Author: ksuchor

CCCC is calling on its members to take part in our Wikipedia Initiative. As one of the five most visited websites in the world, Wikipedia has emerged within living memory as a key knowledge-broker and perception-shaper for readers and writers worldwide. Writing expert knowledge into Wikipedia is one important way we can address knowledge gaps, imbalances, and misinformation online.

Established in 2019, the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative proceeds from the conviction that it matters to edit Wikipedia, especially for academics committed to knowledge equity as a fundamental groundwork for social justice. CCCC Wikipedia Initiative is working to develop skills, cultivate inclusive community, and build structures of support and recognition for for past, present, and future CCCC members who recognize the importance of engaging with Wikipedia as a form of global public humanities scholarship.

The core goal of the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative is to foster the cultural shift, community building, and collaboration necessary for our profession to develop high-quality Wikipedia articles that expand the audiences of our research and scholarship to broad publics. To this end, we aim to:

• Expand Wikipedia’s coverage of topics related to writing research and pedagogy to be comprehensive and current with major conversations in published scholarship;
• Verify that article content is based on reliable secondary sources and represents disciplinary controversies and consensus with attention to issues of knowledge equity;
• Revise and edit toward article quality measures for Good Article or Featured Article status.

Learn about the work of the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative Committee.

Get Support for Teaching with Wikipedia

Interested in teaching with Wikipedia? The Wiki Education Foundation offers training modules as well as editing/tech support for you and your students. Wikipedia-based writing and research assignments can be amazing opportunities to make student writing valuable beyond the classroom in both graduate and undergraduate courses. The information and ideas you teach deserve a global audience. Apply here.

Resources

• CCCC Wikipedia Initiative online: Programs and Events dashboard, Meetup page, WikiProject Writing
• Wikipedia Help: Overview, How should experts engage with Wikipedia?
• Community: The Signpost
• Research: Wikimedia Research Showcase

Considering Our Commonplaces

2020 CCCC Annual Convention
March 25-28, 2020
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Program Chair: Julie Lindquist

Submit a Proposal for the 2020 CCCC Convention

Call for Proposals

Now is a good time to think about who we are and what we really value.

Just as it is at any other time.

Which is to say, now is a good time.

An ongoing priority of CCCC is the achievement of inclusivity—within the organization, within higher education, within our classrooms. As an organization whose business is the conduct of higher education, this should be our most persistently important goal, the ethical principle that is at the deep core of our decisions and actions. In fact, our history of conferences over the years is populated by calls for inclusivity, either as an explicit charge or as an implicit goal—which is to recognize inclusivity as both a focus of our ongoing attentions and as a persistent need that has demanded those attentions by affecting nearly every aspect of who we are as a community and what is possible for us to do: where we assemble, who we teach, how we grow knowledge even as we enact change.

It’s a good time to ask: what have we learned?

What inclusivity is (and means and takes) is a question that has motivated my life’s work as an educator. I am an unlikely product of higher education. The circumstances of my life have meant that I have always been positioned at an odd angle to the general project of education. I am a first-generation college graduate whose path to higher education (and especially, to the PhD) has been both improbable and fortuitous. I am a child of a single mother, raised by immigrant grandparents whose first language was not English. I left high school and got my first full-time job when I was 15; I began my postsecondary education at community college, where I learned that I would need a GED before transferring to the four-year institution close to home. It’s no surprise, I imagine, that I have never been able to settle comfortably into the usual narratives of opportunity, achievement, and mobility. The values that are at the heart of my work, and the directions my research has taken, are products of my experience of alienation from normative narratives of education. The fact of this formative (and persistent) dissonance continues to be the motivating force for my own work as a researcher and teacher–which is to say that it is a source of inspiration, action, ethical understanding, critique, and reflection.

I am also aware that I am not alone.

It’s a good time to ask: What might we learn?

Our struggles to attain disciplinary legitimacy have been ongoing. Our achievements have been hard-won. Whatever else it might be, a discipline, as a tradition of knowledge-making practices, is also an architecture of commonplaces. As tacit operating premises, commonplaces help us to see things by giving us permission to not see things. A healthy disciplinary practice is one of returning, over and over again, to the truths that are most deeply lodged in our collective imagination: for example, that “critical thinking” is an uncomplicated idea, a transparent virtue, and an irreproachable goal. That, when it comes to the game of writing assessment, some students must fail so that others may succeed. That teaching inclusively is (only) a matter of teaching “about” diversity, rather than a matter of creating storied learning experiences, or making good on the ones students have. That our primary activity is “teaching,” rather than creating learning opportunities for students. That “learning” is an experience that entails only gains, and never losses.

Nowhere is the tension between tradition and innovation more evident than in the very idea of commonplaces. It’s an idea that has had a long and troubled history in rhetoric, and it’s both the concept and the trouble that interest me, here. I think both can be productive for the purposes of naming and reflecting on what we believe and what we value. For Aristotle, commonplaces (topoi) named a store of common understandings, a set of shared cultural resources, by means of which rhetoricians could construct arguments. Later, the idea came to signify ideological means for exclusion from the most exclusive and privileged scenes of knowledge production. If the commonplaces of a given community (or culture) give us a way to understand what it believes and values, then they are also a way for us to see how it defines and defends its borders. For this reason, the idea may be a productive one precisely for what it affords in naming both what and who are present and absent in our knowledge-making community.

With my colleague and collaborator Bump Halbritter, I’ve spent the past decade thinking and writing about commonplaces. The two of us been motivated to do so by our experiences as researchers, which have taught us about the deep complexities of students’ lives in and out of school, and the adaptive strategies these lives produce. We have been motivated to do so by our experiences as teachers, which have allowed us to witness students in their encounters with educational routines and expectations. We have been motivated to do so by our work as WPAs, which has revealed to us not only that the commonplaces that most direct our work as practitioners are ours, and not those of others (students, colleagues in other disciplines, publics), but also, in our interactions with teachers, that commonplaces of teaching and students can often over-determine difficult human problems. Most of all, we have been motivated to so do by what we’ve learned from students’ stories, and how to listen to those stories and attend to their tellers. We have become increasingly convinced that there are some commonplaces which, even as they enable community practices, interfere with the potential for ethical innovation. It seems to us that these commonplaces often entail ideas about learners and learning—what learners do and need, how learning happens, and on what grounds learning may be refused.

With our reflection on each commonplace, we discover how much more we have yet to learn.

To observe that disciplinary commonplaces have become commonplace is, of course, a commonplace. What is less clear is what should follow from this observation. Commonplaces give us a common sense of purpose, and they organize thought and action. That’s the good news about commonplaces: in a chaotic world of busy routines, commonplaces are what help us understand our goals and values and manage the work of the everyday. Of course, that is also the bad news: often, the routines enabled by commonplaces become so deeply routinized as to be impervious to (or at least, unlikely subjects of) reflection. I think immediately here of our practices of assessment. In working with teachers, for example, I have learned how much the everyday pressures and routines of assessment control our sense of what is possible and necessary: assessments must come primarily from teachers, must be holistic (and copious!) in order to be responsible, must not fail to hold students accountable for all that is flawed or wrongheaded or undeveloped. As busy people, we as teachers need to work from a core of operating principles about what it means to assess students’ work in order to get the work done. And yet, these enabling principles, as they are commonly placed within the conditions of everyday life, may be the very things that make it hard to see what might go better.

Which is to say: Now is a good time.

We are in an ideal moment to reflect on our most durable beliefs and practices, as things are going both badly and well. I think we would likely agree that what is going badly is the current national scene, in which rancor, division, and mistrust prevail, and in which the purposes and conduct of education at all levels are being contested. Wisconsin, as it turns out, has been the scene of aggressively competing commonplaces about what education is and does and who it serves, and of new (not so new) debates about whether education is best conceived as a public good or a private commodity. The former governor of Wisconsin, for example, has worked assiduously to cut higher education budgets that fund programs in the humanities and in general education. Meanwhile, at the national level, our secretary of education has made moves toward the privatization of schools and the defunding of public ones.

What is going well, of course, is the strength and resolve of our organization as a countervailing force in national and local conversations about educational access, adult literacy, rhetorical ethics, and cultural and social diversity. We know that our work as members of CCCC has a renewed exigency and a new urgency.

I invite you to reflect, in this moment, on what purposes our commonplaces serve. To what extent are these purposes aligned with ethical and productive goals? In these politically turbulent times, how are our commonplaces serving us? How are they expressed in practice? Whose experiences are they recognizing and affirming? To whom are they giving access? Our conference location for 2020, Milwaukee, our common place, is an auspicious location to consider and reconsider our educational mission and our theories of learning. Wisconsin is the site of a distinctive innovation in inclusive education, the Wisconsin Idea, which advanced the radical notion that state universities should serve the state, and that education should be accessible to all its residents. A more inclusive practice of higher education, the thinking went, should not be exclusively vocational, but should include an education in civic and humanistic ideals as well, and should make education available to all residents of the state via outreach and extension programs. In recent years, however, these ideas have been directly challenged, with significant consequences for the Wisconsin system and those it serves. We may ask: What commonplaces about access and inclusivity produced Wisconsin’s distinctive vision of education, and which ones have resulted in recent moves to change this vision? How are these sets of commonplaces alive in public discourses of education, and what do they predict for the future?

What can we learn in this moment, and in this place?

At this moment and in this place, I invite you to return to your own most durable beliefs and practices as an educator (in classrooms, as a researcher/writer, of publics?) and to ask yourself: When it comes to the work I do as an educator, what are my most sacred values? How do these values direct my practice? What do I believe to be true that I have always believed to be true? What did I once believe that I no longer believe to be true? If my beliefs and values have changed, what occasioned these changes? What are the human encounters, crises, and unlikely events that have compelled me into different relationships with my own truths? How has listening to the stories of diverse others motivated me to form a different relationship with my own experience, my own truths? From what experiences and locations do I draw my most actionable beliefs—values, principles, scholarship, experience, lore? How have my practices changed over time, given what I have always believed and no longer believe? What goals have I found most difficult to reach, and by what means might I identify difficulties in my practice in order to do so? How are my beliefs aligned with, and in opposition to, the educational institutions and communities in which I move? And, critically: What can I best learn from others? What can I only learn from others?

Ask yourself: What do I know, and how do I know it? What will it take for me to learn more, or learn differently?

This is important work for all (each) of us in considering our relationships with commonplaces.

I have often remarked that I never met a paradox I didn’t trust. The space occupied by this call is one of paradox, of the persistently tense relationship of tradition and innovation. Even as my mission here is invite us to question commonplaces, I don’t mean to suggest that I have not—that we should not—learn from the work of those who came before us, from traditions established as productive lines of inquiry. The invitation to reconsider commonplaces may be read to suggest that we are only interested in digging up our foundation of ideas and common practices. But it may just as well entail a dislodging rather than an upending, a nudging rather than an overturning. These motions, though they may seem small, may help us to discover new options for how we think about what we do (and new actions associated with this), rather than to abandon what is serving us, and (especially) those we serve, well. If we are to be an organization with an inclusive educational mission and a community, then we would be well advised to consider the foundational ideas we share and continue to ask whether these ideas are serving those we serve. Who are our students, what do they need, and why would they consent to learn what we hope to teach them?

In the spirit of this inquiry, we invite proposals for invitations to

• Consider the cultural and disciplinary origins of (our) commonplaces.
• Inquire into the capacity of commonplaces—about students, learning, technology, education—to direct our pedagogical practices.
• Question how our commonplaces may have occluded more productive understandings of learners and learning.
• Reflect on the public uses and value of our commonplaces.
• Consider how commonplaces are products of traditions that have served, and continue to serve, us well.
• Inquire into who is most sponsored, and who is most excluded, by our most sacred values and practices.
• Question how our commitments to diversity, inclusion, and access may call for new understandings of our practices.
• Reflect on how our commonplaces direct practices of research and representation.
• Consider how our stories of learning may help us complicate durable commonplaces.
• Inquire into the commonplaces of particular communities, and consider how these may function as assets for education.
• Reflect on what we assume about the motives students may have for refusing our pedagogies.
• Consider how our encounters with commonplaces in other disciplines may help us to become more aware of the possibilities and limitations of our own.
• Inquire into our common beliefs about the nature and conduct of teaching and learning.
• Question what we believe about the relationship of argument and persuasion to the conduct and effects of public discourse.
• Reflect on relationships between disciplinary and public commonplaces about what it means to teach and learn.
• Inquire into how the commonplaces of local institutions interface and interact with disciplinary commonplaces.
• Question how the commonplaces that direct our how professional organizations and events—including CCCC—function, and whose interests they serve and do not serve.

In keeping with the goal of (re)imagining commonplaces of learning, we would do well to reflect on our understandings of what the CCCC event is and does as an educational experience for its participants, and to ask: How can the convention, as a common place, better serve its attendees as learners? How can we put our best practices as teachers and researchers in the service of this learning?

What if we questioned the commonplace that the convention is primarily a place to “present,” to deliver knowledge-products? What if we reimagined the convention as a common place of inquiry and learning?

In the spirit of returning to and reflecting on commonplaces, CCCC 2020 will deliver experiences that are both common and uncommon in relation to the traditions of the convention as an institution. The convention will continue to be a place for connection, reconnection, and the productive exchange of ideas. But it will include new kinds of common places for the purposes of sharing ideas and experiences as community (and as a community of communities), more opportunities conversation and reflection, new kinds of teaching and learning experiences for attendees, accessibility mentoring opportunities, and a new role and session type to invite new forms of participation:

• New session type: the Engaged Learning Experience session. ELE sessions are spaces for invention, problem-solving, experiential learning.
• New program role: the convention Documentarian. The Documentarian are invited/enlisted to document their particular convention experiences and to create a variety of reflective narratives about their experiences.

Engaged Learning Experience Sessions

A commonplace about sessions is that they generally consist of a panel of three sequential presentations. Engaged Learning Experience sessions are an alternative genre of concurrent session, a dedicated space for invention, problem-solving, and experiential learning. As with all sessions, leaders should think in terms of a learning goal and a means for moving participants toward it. In the case of Engaged Learning Experience sessions, some means for moving toward learning goals might include (things like) problem-solving groups, spoken-word poetry, dramatization/improv, making, role-playing, storytelling.

CCCC 2020 Documentarians

A commonplace about program participation is that in order to be listed as a contributor to the convention program, you must have a role in a scheduled session. In 2020, a new “speaking” role will be introduced: the Documentarian. The CCCC Documentarian role is an opportunity for attendees to participate in a new way, and to take part in a collaborative inquiry into what a conference is and does—and for whom—and to teach the rest of us. The Documentarian role has been designed to respond to four primary questions about how attendees experience the CCCC Annual Convention:

1. What does it mean to attend the convention? The efforts of Documentarians will help the CCCC community better understand the range of attendees’ convention experiences.
2. What do we learn at the convention? The Documentarian role is designed not only to document things that happen at the convention, and the perspectives of those who experience those things, but to help Documentarians—and those who may benefit from their stories—identify the learning they did by way of their convention experiences.
3. What are the outcomes of a convention experience? The results of the Documentarians’ efforts will be made available to the CCCC community in a variety of ways, including both formal and informal publication of the resulting documentary stories.
4. What does it mean to be included? How diverse are our experiences? The Documentarian role is meant to provide a new form of convention access to a broad range of attendees. Because they fill a “speaking” role (technically, a speaking back role), Documentarians will appear on the program.  

Documentarian roles are available to those with or without another speaking role at CCCC. For example, it is possible to be on the program solely as a Documentarian or as a panelist and a Documentarian. Documentarians’ products will be realized as a variety of written (i.e., alphabetic—not filmed or audio-recorded) products that capture highlights of, and reflections on, Documentarians’ convention experiences.

What will YOU do should you serve as a Documentarian? As a Documentarian, you’ll complete a brief instructional module, attend the convention, choose a path through the convention experience, record some observations about the things you see and hear, and then compose a reflective narrative about your experiences. To help you along in this work, you’ll be given a prompt and a set of guidelines for planning, attending, documenting, and reflecting on your experience with the convention. You’ll also be encouraged to meet and connect with other Documentarians throughout the convention in any spaces made available for this purpose. You can indicate your interest in serving in a Documentarian role as part of the regular review process.

Proposals for CCCC 2020

Regardless of role or session type, reviewers will be seeking proposals for talks and sessions that engage their audiences as learners. Successful proposals will

• Engage the idea of commonplaces in some way, either directly or in terms of the work the presentation/session will do. Some ways to take up the idea might be (but are not limited to) to think of commonplaces as
  • tacit expectations
  • social constructions
  • claims to power
  • means for inclusion/exclusion
  • means for controlling access
  • world view
  • scenes of action
  • means to legitimize/delegitimize knowledge
  • enabling fictions
• Describe an experience for learners as much as content to be delivered (for example, will specify the role(s) audience members will be invited to fulfill during or in response to the presentation).
• Give evidence that the proposer is thinking pedagogically about the talk or session, with the learning needs of audiences/participants in mind.
• Articulate learning goals for the participants, and means to get there: What will participants take away from the presentation? How do you plan to make it possible for them to do so?

We hope to see you in Milwaukee, our common place for CCCC 2020!

Julie Lindquist
2020 Program Chair

Submit a Proposal for the 2020 CCCC Convention

Full Program

(note: this is a large PDF file that may take several minutes to open)

Program by section

• Table of Contents, Greetings, General Information, Other Events, Wednesday Workshops, and Thursday General Events
• Thursday Sessions
• Friday Events and Sessions
• Saturday Events and Sessions, Maps, and Exhibits
• Index of Participants
• Advertisements

The 2019 Convention app is now available! Search for “NCTE” in your app store. Use the desktop version to upload your session materials.

Additionally, you can access the online version of the program here. Hard copies of the program will be available at registration.

Statewide Land Acknowledgement Statement
Maryland State Arts Council

Read the Maryland State Arts Council’s “Statewide Land Acknowledgement Statement.” This statement is based on one drafted by an elder of the Choptico Band of Indians, Piscataway-Conoy Tribe for the MSAC Land Acknowledgement Project. Listen to an audio pronunciation guide.

For additional land acknowledgement resources from the Maryland State Arts Council, visit https://msac.org/resources/land-acknowledgements and the MSAC Land Acknowledgement Project Overview and Resource Guide.

Additional Resources

As rhetoricians, it is our responsibility to understand the history of the places where we live, teach, and gather. It is our responsibility to understand how the history of these places shapes the knowledge making, storytelling, teaching, and learning of Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit peoples. As scholars and as teachers, we have a responsibility to learn and to speak the truth about the historical legacies of settler-colonial language and literary education in residential and settler school systems as well as about contemporary settler colonialism within our profession.  

It is the responsibility of the Conference on College Composition and Communication to make actionable its commitments to healing relations and creating from this healing equal and reciprocal partnerships and alliances with Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit members of our profession. 

To begin meeting this responsibility, CCCC affirms its commitment to  

• Advancing citation justice broadly and, in particular, advocating for reading, teaching, and citing the work of Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit scholars, writers, knowledge creators, and storytellers. We call on our membership to also make and act upon this commitment. 
• Ensuring that the organizers of each Annual Convention focus on connecting Convention attendees with Indigenous communities on whose territories we gather to teach and learn with and for all our relations. 
• Encouraging panelists at our gatherings, regardless of the subject of their presentations, to reflect on whether or how their work meets the needs and interests of Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit students; acknowledges the contributions of Indigenous, Métis and Innuit scholars; and addresses an audience that includes Indigenous, Métis, and Innuit peoples. 
  

Four books you should read that were written by CCCC American Indian Caucus members 

Anderson, Joyce Rain, Rose Gubele, and Lisa King. Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story: Teaching American Indian Rhetorics. Utah State UP, 2015. 

King, Lisa. Legible Sovereignties: Rhetoric, Representations, and Native American Museums. Oregon State UP, 2017.  

Mukavetz, Andrea Riley, with Frances Geri Roossien. You Better Go See Geri: An Odawa Woman’s Life of Recovery and Resilience. Oregon State UP, 2021.  

Wieser, Kimberly G. Back to the Blanket: Recovered Rhetorics and Literacies in American Indian Studies. U of Oklahoma P, reprint edition, 2017.  

To learn even more, check out this annotated bibliography of scholarship on American Indian and Indigenous rhetorics, with a special focus on those works produced by NCTE/CCCC Caucus members: https://kimberlywieser.oucreate.com/americanindianandindigenousrhetbib/ 

Four books you should read about settler colonialism, academia, and anticolonial research, teaching, and writing 

Garcia, Jeremy, Valerie Shirley, and Hollie Anderson Kulago. Indigenizing Education: Transformative Research, Theories, and Praxis. Information Age Publishing, 2022. 

Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books Ltd. and U of Otago P, 1999. 

Wilson Shawn. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood Publishing, 2008.  

Younging, Gary. Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples. Brush Education, Inc., 2018.

The Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Annual Convention features more than 750 sessions and events that highlight the most current thinking in the field. While most presenters come from the higher education space, many of the topics explored are relevant to secondary educators. Our common commitment to the success of the students we teach makes this Convention a great opportunity to exchange ideas and learn from one another.

Join us Saturday, March 16 at #4C19 for a day of invigorating learning! One-day registration is just $80 and includes access to the sessions highlighted below as well as many others.

 9:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. 

“Power to the People, No Delay.” The Transformative Force of Hip-Hop as Social Justice Catalyst

This workshop explores hip-hop’s roots in social justice and how this artistic, social, and cultural movement has opened and continues to open up spaces for oppressed peoples’ voices, experiences, and resistance. Participants will apply an organic intellectual approach from hip-hop to generate ways to make communities and/or schools inclusive and welcoming to all, as well as interact with a live performance and Q&A session with hip-hop artists K.Freshh and Dr. Hollyhood.

12:30 to 1:45 p.m.

Choose from 41 concurrent sessions on a wide range of topics, including:

• Transforming Everyday Digital Literacies
• Writing and Teaching in STEM Collaborations
• Cultivating Students’ Identities as Researcher-Writers
• Contact Improv as Antiracist Composition
• Revising Ideas of Genre in Writing of Academia, Fiction, and Comics
• Teaching and Arguing in the Age of Outrage

2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

Choose from 7 different workshops, including:

Theater as Antiracist Pedagogy: Audience, Empathy, and Privilege
Participants will experience theatrical exercises to foster empathy, examine privilege and place, and train students to engage in audience awareness, textual conversation, and form.

Revision as REmix: Hip-Hop Instructional Practice & the Art of Revision
By exploring the core elements of hip-hop, participants will learn to guide a hip-hop-infused lesson on revision for their students.

Learn more and register today! 

Saturday Workshops

Saturday, March 16, 2019 – 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. (unless otherwise noted)

(SW.01) Community Writing Mentoring Workshop

Sponsored by: The Coalition for Community Writing

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: Sponsored by the Coalition for Community Writing, experienced scholar-practitioners will provide resources and offer individualized mentorship and feedback on community-based writing projects.

Full description:

Background
Community Writing, a growing subfield within Rhetoric and Composition, studies and implements writing about, with, for, and by local and global communities. Popularized by genres such as service-learning, community-based research, community literacy, ethnography, community publishing, public writing, and advocacy and activist writing, community writing locates its work within the broad, historical traditions of rhetoric and composition, literacy studies, and related disciplines.

In October 2017, the second Conference on Community Writing (CCW) took place at the University of Colorado Boulder, attracting 450 scholars, activists, and community members representing 48 states, three countries, 207 colleges, universities, and community organizations. This large group was drawn to a vision of higher education that connects with local, national, and international communities by using writing for education, public dialogue, and social change.

The overwhelming response to the conference underscored a desire by those working in community writing—as community organizers, students, teachers, and researchers—to have opportunities to network, share best practices, and receive mentoring. Attendees at the conference expressed a specific desire for mentorship from scholars, teachers, and activists with more experience in designing, implementing, sustaining, and evaluating community-based writing practices and the scholarship that emerges in concert with them. Additionally, at the conference, a group of leading scholars in the field began steps toward the creation of the Coalition for Community Writing.

This workshop responds to the desires expressed by the hundreds of attendees at the CCW conference for a hands-on opportunity for teachers, scholars, and community writers and organizers to dialogue with and receive feedback from senior scholars in community-based writing.

The Workshop

This proposed workshop, which will be sponsored by the new Coalition for Community Writing, will serve as the first mentorship event since the organization’s launch. The workshop will offer mentoring and feedback on community-based writing projects. It will be led by twelve scholars in rhetoric and composition, a diverse group of faculty who have deep experience with community projects and who have published many books and articles in community writing. Our group can offer advice related to project design, ethics of community work, ways to evaluate projects, questions related to scholarship, as well as job and tenure evaluation strategies.

This workshop will also showcase two mentorship projects associated with community writing. The first is a national online network of community writing practitioners through the Map of Community Writing, which we will launch at the workshop. The MCW will function as a mentorship and resource visualization tool for users to search and upload data to a national repository of community writing people, projects, and programs. The second project is a compilation of resources and mentorship opportunities, created by the CCCC Strategic Action Task Force over the last year in response to the threats against engaged scholars in the National Association of Scholars report and from other right-wing groups.

We invite participants at any level of experience with community-based writing who would like an opportunity for individual mentoring: those with early ideas and emerging projects, or those with long-term projects.

The workshop will open with each of the workshop facilitators giving a 3-minute account of their current research and the areas in which they can offer mentorship. We will then break into smaller groups of 5-6 at tables, with two facilitators at each table. Each participant will have the opportunity to share their research project, course, or program idea and receive feedback. Each participant can expect to present to the table for about 5 minutes and receive about 5-7 minutes of feedback, minimum. The timing will, of course, depend upon the number of attendees. While the senior scholar facilitators at the table will offer mentorship, others at the table may function as both mentor and mentee, based on experience. Participants will have the opportunity to switch tables once, providing them two sets of feedback and invaluable face-to-face communication with some of the leaders in the field of community writing.

In the last 45 minutes of the workshop, the Map of Community Writing (MCW)’s web developer will demonstrate the map’s capabilities and affordances and will guide participants in uploading their contact information and any materials they would like to share to the map. Finally, one of the workshop facilitators will share results and resources from the CCCC Strategic Action Task Force.

Afternoon Schedule, 1:00-4:30

1:00-1:30 Welcome and Facilitator Introductory Presentations
1:30-2:30 First Round of Mentorship Networking and Workshopping
2:30-2:45 Break
2:45-3:45 Second Round of Mentorship Networking and Workshopping
3:45-4:10 Introduction to the Map of Community Writing and Participant Input of Information
4:10-4:25 Discussion of CCCC Strategic Action Task Force resources
4:25-4:30 Closing Remarks and Plan for Follow-up Mentoring Meeting at the Conference on Community Writing in October 2019

(SW.02) Join the Cypher of Hip Hop Pedagogy and Practice!

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: Come share your skills, pedagogies and practices in the cypher, to discuss Hip Hop in academia and the English composition classroom.

Full description:

Join the Cypher of Hip Hop Pedagogy and Practice!

The facilitator is a pioneering B-Girl from the early eighties Hip Hop scene in Seattle Washington, but she is still active in the Hawai’i Hip Hop community today. She has taught B-Boy/Girl workshops at several local YMCAs, B-Girl Be (Minneapolis), Girl Fest Hawai’i, Girl Power Hawai’i and many more. She is also an adjunct lecturer, graduate assistant and English instructor who incorporates Hip Hop “ways of seeing” into her curriculum.

This workshop invites Hip Hop pedagogues and practitioners to join a discourse about Hip Hop and its place in academia and English composition. The session includes empirical examples combined with a b-boy/girl dance lesson and a discussion or cypher for the co-performers.

2:00-3:00pm: In the first hour of this workshop the facilitator will demonstrate how to incorporate the five elements of Hip Hop (b-boying, emceein, djing, beatboxing, graffiti) into the college classroom with a focus on first year writing composition courses. Attendees will be asked to identify traditional literary forms that can be established within all the five elements such as repetition, format and style. We will then discuss how the five elements present a challenge to the Eurocentric epistemologies of argument and rhetoric.

3:00-4:00pm: The facilitator will then invite other Hip Hop pedagogues and practitioners to join the cypher and show their skills in the sixth element: knowledge, which for our purpose will be a collaboration between academics and emic experiences within Hip Hop Kulture. If the cypher calls for it, the facilitator will incorporate an example of the heated exchange between KRS One and what he calls “rap historians” to ruminate over the questions of who has the authority to teach, preserve and document Hip Hop. I expect the facilitator and co-performers to engage in a serious discussion about how professors can draw from Hip Hop to reform education without the risk of appropriation. The facilitator is open, however, to follow the flow and go wherever this discourse may lead us.

4:00-5:00 Finally, as a b-girl practitioner and teacher, the facilitator will lead the co-performers in a dance class to teach the foundations of b-boying/girling. Other practitioners in the cypher are welcome to assist in the instruction. The lesson will last about thirty minutes and it will be followed by one final discussion question, which is to consider the relevance of implementing a similar type class in the English classroom and consider how it could be implemented. The session will conclude with the co-performers experiences, final words and final cypher.

What I expect the facilitator and the co-performers to leave with is our shared experiences in the cypher.

Please come prepared with your kicks and active clothing attire.

(SW.03) Theater as Antiracist Pedagogy: Audience, Empathy, and Privilege

Level: All

Cluster: First-Year and Advanced Composition

Abstract: Theatrical exercises to foster empathy, examine privilege and place, and train students to engage in audience awareness, textual conversation, and form.

Full description:

As theater makers who have each taught First Year Composition for over a decade, we see the dramatic arts as both a theoretical and practical way of thinking about writing pedagogy and difference.  In particular, we are inspired by playwright Tony Kushner’s (1995) essay about the power performance has for training us to have empathy for The Other; by our lights, acting or directing or playwriting or even watching theater can encourage a kind of code-meshing (Canagarajah, 2006) in which the theater maker/watcher incorporates multiple codes, multiple languages, multiple performed selves.  The empathetic practices inherent in theatrical performance thus give rise to the kind of anti-racist pedagogy Innoue (2015) argues for when he asks teachers to construct assessment ecologies where students and teachers are “connected in explicit ways” (p.289); theater demands connection, performance creates interdependent ethos. In addition to empathy-fostering exercises, workshop attendees will explore how theater practices can train students to engage in audience awareness, textual conversation, and formal invention.  Which is to say that we position theater as part of the Teaching for Transfer movement (Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak, 2014). Continuing the work we presented in Portland (2017’s CCCC), in which a series of short presentations were each followed by a drama-fueled pedagogical exercise, we will explore both the ways performance can become source text and the ways it can inform student decisions regarding form, mode, genre.

Act 1. “Removing Privilege from the Parlor:  Hip Hop and the Burkean Oar”
Philosopher Kenneth Burke imagines a scenario where people are in a room having a conversation that continues indefinitely.  Situating his reader as “you,” he famously writes “Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come in late…You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar.”  Burke’s metaphor encourages thinkers to contribute to an ongoing discourse; Burke can be an excellent tool for teaching students how to engage their own performative rhetoric in relation to that of others’. Yet what if the conversation is not accessible to all listeners?  This workshop aims to remove privilege from Burke’s parlor by utilizing hip hop to teach students about their own potential “oar.” Diving into Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” and Jay Z’s “Hard Knock Life,” Performer 1 will experiment with performative rhetoric and lead participants to consider their own relationship to this music.  What aspects of the discourse can we access easily? What seems far away from our own experience? How does that inform our individual voice’s relationship to this material? Together, we will ponder difficulty in teaching this material to privileged students and the wonders of prompting some of those without privilege to feel more grounded in a discourse than their peers.

Act 2. “Performing for Transfer: Site Specific Theater as Metaphor and Method for Teaching Audience and Genre Awareness.”
Performer 2 will mine a play, The Sublet Experiment, as a case study for the relationships between performance, audience, genre, and space.  The play, which had ran for over 6 months, was performed in a different New York City apartment every weekend.  Interrogating Miwon Kwon’s (2002) binary of integration/intervention in site specific art, Performer 2 will work with participants on an inductive process students can use for mapping the ways in which the play’s performances were changed by their sites and by their audiences.  The key concept this work introduces is Audience Closeness. How close is the audience to the performers, and how does that proximity change the choices the performers focus on? Workshop participants will experientially explore this concept by writing a short theory of audience awareness and then “acting” out that theory in front of other participants in three sitings: near-audience, circular-audience, and far-audience.  These performative metaphors of interdependence will then be transferred back into skills and processes connected to audience awareness in writing (e.g. how can students alter their writing depending on how “close” to themselves they imagine their audience to be, etc.). In this way, the workshop will extend the Teaching for Transfer work of Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak (2014). We will examine the TFT terms of audience and rhetorical situation in the setting of site specific performances and help students imagine different physical settings of audience as a way of understanding formal choices such as diction, exposition, citation requirements, and other generic demands.

Act 3. “Memoirs of Place: The Geographies of the Self”
As we walk down the street we can acknowledge that other people have inhabited this space before us, but can we imagine what they were thinking?  What their values and preoccupations were? What kept them up at night? One of the most intimate ways of understanding the performance of everyday life is through diaries and first-person accounts. This presentation and performance, based on a seminar taught at our home institution, will explore how a wide range of narratives can help give us multiple perspectives of a single place. Performer 3 will train participants to read diaries as performance: the New York of 1704 that greeted Sarah Kemble Knight, the perspective of Harriet Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the debates of Wong Chin Foo (one of the first naturalized Chinese immigrants).  These diaristic modes will be contrasted with “personal” place-centered performances that take the form of art, such as Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror.  Performer 3 will argue that a survey of first-person accounts provides students with many opportunities to engage in the varieties of lived experience from the bottom up.  The workshop will then lead participants through a multi-modal exercise, in which they will create an online map that highlights places where they have experienced something important, as well as excerpts from the experiences of others (found in poems, diaries, photos). In this way, participants will create a “geography of the self,” a collaborative composition that is built in relation to what others have experienced. This workshop will be an enactment of performing and constructing place through an integration of the self and The Other.

(SW.04) Building and Running an Academic Journal: A Behind-the-Scenes Workshop in Independent Publishing

Level: All

Cluster: Institutional and Professional

Abstract: This workshop demystifies journal editing to prepare new people to run established journals and support the creation of new journals.

Full description:

Building on the call to embody composing knowledges, this workshop offers performative/experiential learning for folks interested in explore how to create and manage academic journals, whether print-based, open access, hybrid, scholarly and/or pedagogical, or specialized (sometimes referred to as “niche”) journals. Working editors from Across the Disciplines, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, and Literacy in Composition Studies will offer practical advice and purposeful activities based on our experiences as editors of diverse independent journals in rhetoric and composition. Our workshop is pitched to participants at various career stages: advanced graduate students, junior and midcareer faculty, as well as senior faculty seeking to contribute to the discipline in new ways. Our goal is to empower more field members to be actively involved in the knowledge-making process, encourage the creation of new publication venues that prioritize under-represented issues and voices, and to share the tools and practical know-how necessary to take an idea from conception to reality. Finally, as a supportive community of editors, we will continue the dialogue with participants after the workshop, offering advice, materials, and contacts, as appropriate. This workshop takes up the conference’s call to perform possibilities by opening up the often-closed world of journal editing with the goals of both preparing new people to participate in running already-established journals and supporting the creation of new journals.

Half-Day Workshop (1:30-5:00)

1:30-2:00: Introductions.
We will begin with a brief overview of the workshop facilitators’ experiences running and/or creating academic journals. Depending on the number of attendees, participants will introduce themselves and foreground their interests or purposes in this particular workshop (if attendance makes this untenable, participants will have similar opportunities within breakout sessions). We will then explain how the workshop will proceed, deriving our breakout session topics from the narrative we have shared about our own process and struggles. The introduction period will conclude with a few moments for participants to decide their “breakout menu” for the day.

2:00-2:50: Session One: What To Expect When Becoming an Editor

This session leads participants through activities designed to help them explore what to expect from journal editing. All participants will do this activity. Participants read and discuss material from journals, including mission statements, tables of contents, and editors’ introductions. The purpose is to explore what these artifacts demonstrate about audience, expectations for the journal, and the journal’s “persona.” Session activity will primarily be table-based, but the whole room will share discoveries in last 10 minutes.

2:50-3:00: Break

3:00-3:50: Breakout Session One
Participants choose one of the session foci, all of which will be made available to them in advance of the workshop.

A. Starting a Journal: In this breakout session, participants will start building a mission statement for a journal and explore the decisions they would need to make about their new journal. These include who to approach as potential members of the editorial board and how to pitch the journal to these people; editorial processes and structures; publishing platform and frequency of publication; budget and funding; training and staffing.

B. Infrastructural Technologies of Independent Journal Publishing: Participants will explore issues related to online publication, including the affordances and limitations of various platforms for academic publishing. Discussion of software for web and print layouts will also be considered. A special emphasis will be placed on open access (OA) technologies and CreativeCommons licensing schemes for authors and journals.

C. Stabilizing and Preserving Content: Print frontloaded the costs of publishing, but once the print object was created, stocking it on library shelves ensured its accessibility to scholars and preservation in the history of disciplinary knowledge. The free access to online publishing obscures the ephemeral nature of published digital content and shifts the costs of stable access and preservation to the back end, where editors must ensure a link to their authors’ work that is not reduced to “page not found.” This breakout establishes the importance of a strategic plan for ensuring scholarly content remains accessible to future readers and identifies the organizations and possibilities for doing so.

3:50-4:00: Break

4:00-4:50: Breakout Session Two
Participants choose one of the session foci, all of which will be made available to them in advance of the workshop.

A. Peer Review and the Role of the Editor: In this breakout session, participants will read reviewer letters and an initial draft of a subsequently published article (all with permission). Participants will strategize how to synthesize reviews, make decisions about submission, and decide on next steps. Discussion will address how to build a diverse group of reviewers who have the expertise necessary to fulfilling the journal’s publishing mission.

B. Starting a Journal: In this breakout session, participants will start building a mission statement for a journal and explore the decisions they would need to make about their new journal. These include who to approach as potential members of the editorial board and how to pitch the journal to these people; editorial processes and structures; publishing platform and frequency of publication; budget and funding; training and staffing.

C. Copyediting: Participants look at examples of manuscripts before they have undergone copyediting and develop a process for addressing the copyediting needs evident in the texts. This breakout foregrounds the ways that style decisions influence both the presentation of knowledge and larger practices in the field (citing student work, providing access to archival and other source material, etc.).

4:50-5:00: Whole-Group Discussion.
Participants reflect on workshop and articulate their next steps. For those interested in continuing dialogue, contact information may be shared.

(SW.05) Performing Curriculum in the Classroom: Designing Teaching for Transfer (TFT) Courses for Diverse Campuses

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: In this design workshop, we will create adaptations of the Teaching-for-Transfer curriculum to help students perform in multiple scenes–classes, co-curriculars, workplaces, and personal writing.

Full description:

From a pedagogical perspective this understanding of rhetoric and performance becomes a valuable way of acknowledging that texts, experiences, and writing are always given meaning according to time, place, and context, and that this requires an attentiveness to the way developing writers come to view and produce meaning through shared performances, by those who value the progressive possibilities of rhetoric and writing instruction.

—David Green

How to design writing coursessupporting transfer of writing knowledge and practice has garnered considerable attention in Composition and Rhetoric, with scholars researching it and designing courses to facilitate it. Performing this work in a half-day workshop, we will focus on two goals: (1) acquainting participants with the research on the Teaching for Transfer curriculum; and (2) assisting them in designing writing courses, appropriate for their campuses, using the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) curricular design.

Articulated initially in _Writing across Contexts: Composition, Transfer, and Sites of Writing_, and now formally expanded through the 2017 CCCC Research Initiative-sponsored Writing Passport Project (http://writingacrosscontexts.blogspot.com/), the TFT curriculum is offered in first-year composition, upper-level writing, internships, and graduate TA preparation. In this CCCC Research Initiative-sponsored expansion, one of the goals has been to keep the integrity of the curriculum while adapting it appropriately for different purposes and student populations.

Each of the 8 locationshas a unique profile, and thus a unique situation for adapting the curriculum:

—University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College is an open-admissions, two-year, regional college in the UC system, with a highly diverse student population. The adaptations included a shift in readings and reductions in page lengths for assignments.

–Centralia College is a small, rural community college with open-admissions. The student population is predominantly first generation, with most students also working at least part-time. There are also numerous students above the age of 25 who have come to the college as part of worker-retraining or after a major life change. The adaptations for Centralia College were similar to those at Blue Ash, with an additional concern about time for reflection outside of class.

Bristol Community College, a mid-sized, urban, public comprehensive, two-year college, contains a population very much like that of Blue Ash and Centralia. In addition, Bristol has seen a remarkable growth in minority enrollment since the early 2000’s. Adaptations to the TFT curriculum included readings that speak to that diversity.

At UC Santa Cruz, an HSI, R1 university, student demographics have shifted significantly in the past five years, with a growing number of multilingual, international, and first-generation college students. Curricular adaptations have also included a shift in TFT readings, but to meet the campus GE outcomes of the course, the adapted curriculum included sustained inquiry with seven weeks devoted to the study of a self-selected topics over the course of a ten-week quarter.

The University of Denver, a private RU/H on the quarter system, is committed to interdisciplinarity, and students are encouraged to major in more than one area. This site focused on key terms and on the impact of visual mapping of key terms on the development of students’ theory of writing.

The University of Massachusetts Boston, a public, 4-year, majority-minority university in the Northeast, is home to a version of TFT adapted to an upper-level professional writing course that also serves as an introduction to the English major.

–At William Paterson University of New Jersey, a suburban, public 4-year HSI just outside New York City where students are often first generation college learners, more than 70% are commuters, and many are non-traditional students, the TFT curriculum was adapted to an upper level course in Technical Writing, with enrollment from across disciplines.

At Florida State University, a large public residential flagship with an increasingly diverse populationstudents often take internships: the question the research considered was how a condensed introduction to TFT might help these students succeed in their internships.

Given these diverse campuses, their sites of instruction, and the purpose of the TFT curriculumthe central question focusing this workshop is how adaptations of the TFT curriculum can help all students perform as writers in multiple scenes–including in classes, in co-curriculars, in the workplace, and in personal writing. Working toward that end, participants in the workshop will begin creating a TFT curriculum, or revise their existing curriculum with TFT concepts and practices, with feedback and reflection opportunities to continue after the conference.

Our schedule includes 8 segments.

–One: Setting the Scene
1:00

• Introduction of participants to each other
• Icebreaker activity
• Overview of workshop
• What participants want to know: collection of guiding questions from participants
• Exercise: What already works in your course/program?

–Two: Performing Transfer, Performing TFT
1:20

• Definition: transfer of writing knowledge and practice
• Implications of transfer research for classroom practice
• TFT: Key Terms, Systematic Reflection, Theory of Writing
• Key terms: the 8
• Systematic Reflection: definition/student examples
• Theory of Writing: definition/student examples
• Overview of assignments: major and minor examples, with readings

–Three: Remix: Bringing Together What Already Works with TFT
2:00

• Discussion at tables

–Four: Adapting TFT to Various Scenes
2:15

• Kinds of adaptations (e.g., readings)
• Community colleges: major adaptations
• Upper level writing: major adaptations
• Internships: major adaptations

–BREAK
2:45

–Five: Design/Curricular Drafting Session at Tables
3:00
● Basic writing
● FYC at 4-year schools
● FYC at 2-year schools
● Upper level writing
● Internships

–Six: Critical Friends Activity
4:00
● Promising aspects of the draft curriculum
● Aspects of the curriculum to be revised

–Seven: Notes to Self
4:30
• Remix: participant questions and TFT
• Next steps for individual curricular designs

–Eight: Closing Reflection/Staying Connected
4:50

(SW.06) Revision as REmix: Hip Hop Instructional Practice & the Art of Revision

Level: 2-year

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: In this workshop, teachers will explore hip hop instructional practices to help students overcome the common struggle of revising their work.

Full description:

In this workshop, teachers will explore hip hop instructional practices to help students overcome the common struggle of revising their work. By exploring the core elements of hip hop, participants will learn to guide a hip-hop infused lesson on revision for their students. To explore these core elements, participants will write, learn about hip hop sampling and practice revision. This interactive workshop incorporates elements of music, movement, and art.

Teaching students about hip hop sampling, helps connect the act of essay revision to an art form with which many students interact daily: the art of sampling. Getting students to realize how different samples are from the original makes clear the expectation for revision. The other elements I will employ while sharing this lesson are a “meta” presentation on how instructors might embrace hip hop culture overall. Through practicing additional elements throughout the course of workshop, attendees will gain a greater sense of how having a hip hop sensibility might impact their instruction beyond discussing hip hop sampling.

Inter-contextually, rhetorical theory itself encompasses oral and written communication. In a 1992 4Cs position paper, Casaregola argued eloquently that “generation by generation since the Renaissance and the development of print, moved further away from the origins of rhetoric origins that lie in the art of oral rhapsodic composing” (2). He furthers that “ the single most important aspect of ancient rhetoric was its oral performative nature–ancient rhetoric was an art of oral performance, even before it was derided by Plato or described by Aristotle” (4).

This presentation honors the performative nature of rhetoric by incorporating spoken word. The teachers will practice spoken word as a means to become more empowered educators through spoken word. Embodying spoken word will in turn help them to connect with the writing exercise in a performative manner. Though the main instructional component for students will be the discussion of sampling evident in the song clips shown, the main pedagogical component for attendees of the conference will be an embracing of hip hop culture through the use of practicing spoken word. The spoken word component is a means by which teachers may open themselves up to other components of hip hop, such as rap music. I will begin by showing a spoken word poem by Taylor Mali. Then, I will lead teacher-attendees through a series of prompts to create their own spoken word piece.

The questions that I will use for the writing prompt include the following:
1. When did you find your voice as an educator, and how did it impact your identity as both an educator and a person in the world?
2. How has (or might) this identity helped (or help) to increase access to the promise of education for Black and brown students?
3.Use the first letters of your name (first, last, or a combination) to write an acrostic poem that captures your responses to questions 1 & 2.

Then, I will share with them a lesson for teaching revision that I have found to work well with my students. This technique is performative in nature as well, as it involves a lesson on hip hop sampling. Once attendees engage with the lesson, they will then revise their work using the “sampling” technique introduced. I will play clips of songs that have later been sampled and have attendees note the differences between the two songs. This discussion about the practice of sampling will lead into a definition of revision. After this discussion, attendees will consider how they might write a new poem in the same way the hip hop song created a new song from sampling a previous musical arrangment. Teachers will have time to “sample” the first drafts of their poems by using the first draft written to create a new poem.

From there, we will prepare for an open mic session where they share their work. There will have been emphasis placed on “embodying” the poem, as an important component of spoken word. During the time allotted teachers attending the workshop will have the opportunity to perform the spoken word pieces that they create during the writing and revision process. Thus, the workshop will transform into a performative open mic space.

By using an open mic format, this session will flip the traditional conference model on its head by asking attendees to embody the teaching practice they are learning rather than sit down and soak up information. It is meant to be audience-oriented and performative. The teachers will be engaged as co-performers after they have revised their spoken word pieces. We will all gain knowledge of what helps us find voice as teachers.

We will also gain a new way of thinking about the connections between teaching composition and hip hop culture. Attendees will benefit by gaining a new sense of voice and a way to make marginalized centered in their classrooms.

This approach is inclusive and aimed at providing greater access to composition to students historically marginalized in these courses, including African-American and Latino students. Many of these students have to repeat composition. Teaching students to constructively revise their drafts is one way to ensure they become more successful writers. As an African-American female, hip hop educator, I feel that my own voice is underrepresented. I have been in the shoes of my students and am offering a way for my colleagues to uncover what makes those of us who are underrepresented in the academy feel more connected to the space.

(SW.07) DBLAC Writing Workshop

Special note: This workshop will run from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 16.

Sponsored by: Digital Black Lit and Composition (DBLAC)

Level: All

Cluster: Institutional and Professional

Abstract: This Writing Workshop is an extension of DBLAC’s goal to foster a learning community where members are able to present their ideas, research, and writing amongst emerging scholars as a means of professional support and development. During this workshop, participants will be encouraged to share writing goals and writing activities.

Full description:

On the final Saturday of the conference, DBLAC will host a Writing Workshop for DBLAC members (graduate students and supporting faculty and community members).

DBLAC is an online and in-person network of Black-identified graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in fields related to the study of language. Our goal is to provide spaces and opportunities for our members that support their success. In doing so, we work diligently to uplift, support, and highlight the work of Black graduate students. You can read more about our mission and some of our work on our website: dblac.org.

Though many of our programs are tailored to Black graduate students, we are increasingly aware of the collective and universal need for community, especially in intellectual pursuits. That considered, we strive to share our methods and also to promote supportive communal interactions when possible. Our Writing Workshop is an extension of our organization’s goal to foster a learning community where members are able to present their ideas, research, and writing amongst emerging scholars as a means of professional support and development.

During the Writing Workshop, participants will be encouraged to share writing goals and work through individual projects and writing activities.

(SW.08) “Power to the People, No Delay.” The Transformative Force of Hip-Hop as Social Justice Catalyst

Special note: This workshop will run from 9:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. on Saturday, March 16.

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: This workshop explores Hip Hop’s roots in social justice and how this artistic, social and cultural movement has and continues to open up spaces for oppressed peoples’ voices, experiences, and resistance.

Full description:

This workshop explores Hip Hop’s roots in social justice and how this artistic, social and cultural movement has and continues to open up spaces for oppressed peoples’ voices, experiences, and resistance. Facilitators will highlight ways that Hip Hop is an important site of interrogation, especially in current times, and how youth and organizers worldwide are using hip-hop to re(construct), maintain, and negotiate their local situations and identities. A performance and lyrical deconstruction by a Hip Hop artist will be an interactive part of this workshop, as well as open times for discussion, questions and contributions from workshop participants.

In our Saturday Hiphop workshop, participants will:

• interact with a live performance and Q&A session with Hiphop artists K. Freshh and Dr. Hollyhood
• learn how Hip-hop inspired artists, activists, organizations, and coalition work can bring awareness to the need for criminal justice reform, ending state-sanctioned violence of unarmed people of color, as well as movements for environmental and educational justice
• view protests, performances, and news video clips to generate dialogue to enhance approaches to Hiphop Education in Composition and Rhetoric courses, Secondary and Community College English courses, as well as community outreach
• consider how Hiphop artists exhibit organic intellectual moves connected to social justice in their lyrics, words, interviews, music videos, performances, speeches, etc. and how the ideas these artists explore can prompt questions or actions to take with social issues, policies, etc. in the community of Pittsburgh
• apply an organic intellectual approach from Hiphop to identify individuals or groups of people in communities and/or schools that may be forgotten about or marginalized in some ways and generate ways to make communities and/or schools inclusive and welcoming to all
• discuss Hiphop intellectuals’ use of language to promote social justice and then identify how language is used/could be used in local (Pittsburgh) and state (PA) government to promote positive policies, laws, or any social issues

All-Day Workshops

Wednesday, March 13, 2019 – 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

(W.01) Performing Academic Writing in the Real World: Poverty, Disability, and Cultural Contexts in Basic Writing

Sponsored by: Council on Basic Writing (CBW)

Level: All

Cluster: Basic Writing

Abstract: This interactive workshop focuses on how writing and teaching are performed in complex student and institutional contexts.

Full description:

This workshop interrogates the “performance” of academic writing in real world contexts which require our students to perform student behavior and writing. The workshop responds to needs regarding how to best design writing experiences for increasingly diverse groups of students in our classrooms. Peter Adams, founder of ALP, asserts that Basic Writing Students have complicated lives: “Most of them are working, some full-time, some more than full-time and most of them are on financial aid because they come from impoverished backgrounds. Most of them are first generation to go to college.” The classroom is also always a locus for performative acts by both teachers and student. Brenda Jo Bruggermann and Debra A. Moddelmog contend that “The act of disclosing a historically abject identity in the classroom has had significant pedagogical consequences as well.[. . .]. It has also given the teacher a body, and not only a performing body but one that functions (or does not function) in physical [. . .] ways” (312). It is through these two lenses that CBW focuses its 2019 workshop.

The workshop will ask participants to write short vignettes based on real world situations encountered with Basic Writing students (multiple absences for missing the bus, dealing with child care issues, lack of funds, struggling with self-confidence, difficulty with self-advocacy). Throughout the day, these vignettes will be performed to mark transitions from one activity to another. We will return to these vignettes at the end of the day as we perform our roles as scholars of rhetoric and teachers of basic writing by continuing our work in moving toward a position statement on Basic Writing.

Speaker 1: “All Access, All In(clusive)” will allow participants to address elements of their writing classrooms (certain assignments, activities, rubrics, forms of interaction and engagement, expectations and outcomes articulated, etc.) from the outset using principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) so that learning and interactions are optimally inclusive for all kinds of learners (disabled and temporarily able-bodied) This engaged and interactive talk, workshop and discussion about teaching writing based on the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) will talk aboutthe three triangulated networks of learning as they might be developed in your writing classroom: affective (the why); recognition (the what); strategic (the how).

Poster Session 1: Teaching Students how to Perform Science Writing: Rethinking STEM Writing as a Site of Basic Writing
This session will explain why science writing is a site of BW and teach participants how to rethink their approach to teaching the genre in the context of performance. We will base our presentation on a comprehensive pilot study that explored what are essential science writing knowledge gaps that exist in basic science writers (BSW) and hinder composition performance.

Poster Session 2: “Inside Our Classroom: Basic Writing Today” will highlight the work of scholars of color
The CBW has a long-standing commitment to racial justice and inclusivity. As such, we are designating a portion of our program to highlighting the work of scholars of color, with particular emphasis on newer scholars. We will do a call for participation in Fall 2018 via our CBW-listserv, our Facebook Community Page, and our blog.

Speaker 3: Teaching with Disabilities: How does a teachers’ disability impact a classroom? What is at stake for them in their teaching? In their position within an institution? What impact does visible or invisible disability have on student awareness of these subject-positions. This speaker will discuss moving from a position of temporarily able-bodied to disabled and offer strategies for this transition as well as crowd-sourcing from participants discussion around their own experiences.

Speakers 4 and 5: Interrogating and Challenging Deficit Models in Basic Writing

Participants will explore issues that commonly affect student performance beyond traditional academic measures. Such issues might include: outside work schedules, lateness or absences in class, economic hardships, time management, struggles with traditional academic genres, lack of clarity about expectations between previous schooling and college environment. Sometimes framed as deficits in BW Conversations, instead, we will apply specific problem-solving techniques to consider how affective issues impact our classrooms and how we can support student success by acknowledging, solving (where possible) and/or directing students to additional resources and support.

In addition to looking at student success and deficit thinking in terms of students, we also assert that it is important to examine how teacher-scholars use language to engage with students. Socio-linguistic examination of teacher talk and classroom discourses are essential to creating language practices which do not reinforce rhetorics of deficit. It is common to use terms like “non-cognitive” and “affect” to describe the nuanced and complex lives our students bring to the classroom, including deeply embodied intersections of race, class, gender, and disability. These speakers examine teachers’ experiences in the classroom and invite participants to examine their classroom language practices and how they might resist or support the rhetoric of deficit.

Workshop participants will brainstorm relevant issues from both the student and teacher perspective. Then, collectively will identify both traditional and innovative methods to support student success, resulting in a list of practices, resources, and references to share. These resources will be a tangible product of the workshop, publicly accessible.

Speaker 6: Toward a Position Statement on Basic Writing Studies During the 2017 and 2018 CBW workshop, participants worked through an intentional brainstorming processes to develop a draft of principles of basic writing studies. Building on that draft, the facilitators of this final session will lead workshop members through further discussion, debate, revisions, and ratification of those principles. Ideally, the 2018 workshop will end the day by formalizing an official position statement on the teaching and study of basic writing that might disseminated outside the organization. Workshop participants will ultimately be participants in developing and establishing a cohesive vision statement on basic writing to the CCCC Executive Council and beyond.

(W.02) Living Feminist Lives: Materialities, Methodologies, and Practices

Sponsored by: Feminist Caucus

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: Inspired by Sara Ahmed, this sponsored workshop explores ways to “live a feminist life” as teachers, administrators, researchers, scholars, and community members.

Full description:

Sponsored by the Feminist Caucus, the Feminist Workshop will explore ways that we live our feminist practices in the work that we do. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, we urge panelists to ask “ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world…how to create relationships with others that are more equal; how to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less supported by social systems; how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete, histories that have become as solid as walls” (Living a Feminist Life 1). As feminists in the field of composition-rhetoric, we consider these questions central to performing our labors as educators and researchers.

This day-long workshop will focus on ways to do feminist work toward a more equitable future. The workshop features morning and afternoon panels, followed by break-out discussion groups and a rotation of interactive exercises.

Speakers
1 and 2: Speakers One and Two will reflect on how they enact, embody, and teach feminist rhetorical practices in scholarship and teaching, in institutions and communities, exploring critical issues of intersectionality, power dynamics, and social justice. Speaker One will talk about how feminist rhetorics frame her practices in working with communities, drawing from three projects related to Communities Who Know, Inc., a non-profit organization. Speaker Two will explore how feminist rhetorical practices have been taken up in unexpected places, including research focused on the rhetoric of men’s rights, queer scholarship, and non-feminist spaces.

3: Community engagement projects put feminism in action, allowing students and faculty members to join critical cultural dialogues. Speaker Three will discuss a community engagement project with a Georgia refugee community, which includes over 21,000 DACA-impacted individuals. An example of feminism in action, this project moved her, her students, and the refugees, which resulted in new questions and understandings of immigration activism and advocacy. The presentation will discuss the project as well as the need for what Ahmed describes as “feminist tendencies, a willingness to keep going despite or even because of what we come up against” in community-engaged pedagogies and projects.

4: Speaker Four will offer a feminist exploration of teaching for transfer. Various models have emerged for facilitating such transfer. However, while composition studies is often distinguished by critical approaches to writing and teaching, there remains a critical element missing from the discussion surrounding transfer: feminist pedagogical practices. By applying a feminist lens, this speaker will reveal hidden biases, critically question the approach in light of gender, and question power struggles and structures in teaching models that encourage transfer.

5: Speaker Five’s presentation examines the ways the embodied experiences of women of color have historically been that of exclusion, and how we can move forward in a culture that often continues to silence such voices. This sense of exclusion, often felt in academia, is tied to the patriarchal white power structure that still pervades our national identity. In order to move forward, we must acknowledge the lived experiences of women of color. Based on the work of Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldua, this presentation challenges us to consider how powerful the experiences and histories of marginalized voices can be.

6: When we in academia conduct research, write up our results, and publish our research in respected, refereed journals, our work often erases the individual in the name of “science” and “rigor.” In this presentation, Speaker Six argues that as researchers and as feminists we must reveal the ways meaning is made in our field, reflect with care on the personal inflections behind the academic prose, and imagine ways our work can circulate in the world in unexpected, human, non-disciplinary ways. After sharing some of the ways passion animates her current research on one 19th century woman’s insane asylum memoir, she leads the audience in discussion of the ways passion has animated their own scholarship.

7: Speaker Seven will present her journey through the archives at the CUNY Dominican Institute at the City College of New York. As a second generation Latina doing research on the exchange of ideas regarding women and sex between the Dominican Republic and the United States, she needed to “do comparative work responsibly” (LuMing Mao). In this presentation, she argues for a shift in her research lens to account for Dominican feminist history. She will provide a methodology to critically engage with various feminisms and remove our ethnocentric perspective of U.S. based feminism.

8: Speaker Eight outlines the challenge of working with three transnational archives before considering how global scholars might articulate a more critically and rhetorically cautious approach. She will invite workshop participants to examine the constitution and reconstitutions of three transnational archives in order to raise the following questions: While decolonizing archival methodologies call for postcolonial hybridity (Tuhiwai-Smith 2012) and an ethic of accountability (Walsh 2012), how is this achieved when the archive itself is dynamic, circulatory, or not indigenous? Moreover, how can these hybrid and accountable archival methodologies avoid the entrapments of “neo-colonialism” (Nkrumah 1965)?

9: When Maxine Waters’ “reclaiming my time” performance went viral in the summer of 2017, the California congresswoman extended a dialogue about temporality, frustration, and respect that Black women have used to achieve their political needs. Speaker Nine’s talk will show how “reclaiming my time” and other rhetorics of impatience highlight the public and private work of self-care that bell hooks and other feminist scholars consider essential for wellness, work that involves making “it evident to all observers of our social reality that black women deserve care” and “respect…” (hooks 40).

Meeting day/space needs: Wednesday from 9 a.m.-5:00 p.m. / AV & sound equipment, internet accessibility / Need room for 50 people.

Debriefing: Review of the workshop and plans for the future to submit to the CCCC Feminist Caucus Standing Group.

(W.03) Plant Something: Performance-Rhetoric, Community Writing, and Food Activism

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: This workshop will explore community food advocacy organizations and sites for food justice, community building, and education via an interactive discussion and afternoon work party.

Full description:

Community gardens are emerging as important sites for social justice, community building, access to fresh food, and education. (Pena 2005, Cutter- Mackenzie 2008). Ron Finleyrenamed himself the gangsta gardener as part of a larger project to grow food for himself and his community. Integral to this project is his performance of gardening as a gangsta, a deliberate strategy he uses to redefine the gardener as sexy and appealing to urban youth so as to intervene in racist systems that create food deserts and feed the school-to-prison pipeline (Finley 2015, Fair Test 2010). In the documentary about him and other urban gardeners in LA, Can You Dig This, Finley says: “….you see the seed totally changes itself; it destroys itself and then you get life. A lot of things about life made more sense to me the more time I spent in the garden. The garden teaches a system- patience, persistence, care, that things don’t happen instantaneously you know, it is a process, everything is a process.” Embedded in Finley’s thinking is the transformative power of deliberate activist performance, along with a critique of discourse removed from action. At the end of the film he says: “Don’t call me if you want to have meetings and you sit around and talk about doing some shit. Come to the garden, wit your shovel, so we can plant some shit.” This workshop explores what this means for composition studies, for us as academics, teachers and scholars, and as members of diverse communities. It asks us to consider what this means in terms of performing the rhetoric we write: how we, as Frankie Condon suggests, “put [our] money where [our] mouth is” and “[transform] who we think we are or could be with and for others.” How can we rhetorically and physically engage in cultural and material work that contributes to projects like Finley’s and those of other urban food activists without appropriating them?

Building on the rhetorical analysis of Finley’s work and its impact in Eileen Schell, W. Kurt Stavenhagen, and Dianna Winslow’s CCCC 2018 panel: “The Language, Literacy, and Labor of Food Justice: Transforming Communities through Collective Action with Food and Farming,” this workshop investigates the ideological and material work necessary to further food justice. Understanding our field as one that is both deeply committed to praxis and also constrained at times by narrow definitions of literacy, we invite participants to a two-part, day-long workshop that creates a space for us to do as Condon suggests and “[move beyond] the self/other binary to articulating at the joint or point of interdependence between us” and in so doing, “deliberately, reflectively reach for performativity: for being and becoming just as we advocate for justice.”

During the morning workshop, we will open with a discussion of our work; the work of our field; our students’ work; the work of being human in a more-than-human world; and the work of being good neighbors to the diverse people, plants, and other inhabitants of our communities. As Paul Lynch underscores, in the apocalyptic turn in composition studies, worsening material conditions of climate change necessitate both assessment and commensurate performative action to address visceral realities: rising student hunger on college campuses and food insecurity across the globe; the encroachment of for-profit industry into public education and the privatization of other public services and spaces; and troubles posed by climate change demand that we compose a better world (Lynch 2012, Welch and Scott 2016, Broton and Goldrick-Rab 2017, FOA of the UN 2017, Newfield 2018, IPCC 2017). Citing new materialism, indigenous theories of kinship, and activist rhetoric, facilitators will present research and projects that address these challenges, including food justice, social media, and community writing (Gries 2015, Riedner and Mahoney 2008, House 2014, Pennell 2018, Cushman and Blackburn 2013). During the second half of the morning, we will split into small groups for interactive planning sessions that will employ permaculture and retroactive path analysis to visualize ways forward while also focusing our attention on the material at hand (Mollison 1978, Hemenway 2015, Gare 2001).

During the afternoon, we will travel off-site for work parties that pair our words with action. We will partner with area organizations Grow Pittsburgh and 412 Food Rescue to assist in planting seedlings in a greenhouse with the former and perform a “food rescue” with the latter. Working with advocates at these food justice organizations will invite participants to think, talk, touch, and taste as they engage with the spaces and places of Pittsburgh communities and make material-discursive connections with our own campuses and classrooms. Practicing what the morning session will define as relational literacy, such connections will prompt us to consider how to better serve our home communities with our students. Following the model of Transition Townswe will learn more about permaculture and consider applications in other settings (Hopkins 2006). Finally, we will practice using social media during our work party to create an intervention in the convention narrative to draw attention to the material conditions in Pittsburgh, and highlight the work the Pittsburgh community partners are doing to move to better futures as possible actions we can take back to our home communities (Massumi 2002).

(W.04) Performing Our Lives: Creative Nonfiction and (the Art and Rhetoric of) Representation

Sponsored by: Creative Nonfiction Standing Group

Level: All

Cluster: Creative Writing

Abstract: Participants will explore creative nonfiction through writing to prompts and discussing teaching strategies and issues.

Full description:

This workshop, sponsored by the Creative Nonfiction Standing Group, invites participants to experience a day of writing creative nonfiction and exploring ideas for teaching this multi-faceted genre. The life writing and other genres of creative nonfiction are steeped in the fraught question of representation. How do we represent ourselves? How do we represent others? What are the ethical gains and costs of these endeavors? This workshop focuses on the craft and ethics of composing in these genres as we write to perform ourselves and our lives and learn how to teach our students to do so.

Schedule:
9:00 Introductions
9:15 Prompts 1 & 2
9:30-10:30 Writing time & sharing
10:30-10:45 Break
10:45 Presentation 1
11:15 Prompts 3 & 4
11:25-12:30 Writing time & sharing
12:30-1:30 Lunch (sharing of writing encouraged)
1:30 Presentation 2
2:00 Prompts 5 & 6
2:10-3:00 Writing time & sharing
3:00-3:15 Break
3:15 Prompts 7 & 8
3:25-4:15 Writing time & sharing/revision
4:15-4:50 Reading of excerpts from the day’s writing; reflections on teaching approaches
4:50 Evaluation

SPEAKER 1 (prompt): Hide and Seek
Write about something you’ve hidden: perhaps it’s a letter, a gift, a bottle, a scar, a bill, your web browser history, a tattoo, your natural hair color. Write about what you’ve hidden but also seek understanding, whether you’re seeking to understand your own motivation or the particular effects (on yourself and others) of hiding something.

SPEAKER 2 (prompt): Whose Memory Is It Anyway?
Memories tug at us, haunt us, ground, and inspire us. But memories are rarely wholly our own. Choose a memory that includes one or more people and write about the time/place/event from one of these other perspectives. Or write about a memory you treasure, but that was largely constructed for you – think, perhaps, of family or community lore that you weren’t necessarily present for and yet have memories of through stories and/or pictures.

SPEAKERS 3 & 4 (presentation): Performing the Liminal: Creative Nonfiction as Lived Practice
Creative nonfiction occupies liminal space, existing at the interstices of various genres and definitional contradictions. CNF both bridges and frustrates divides between creative and academic modes; personal and scholarly. Far from a vexed position, this interstitial placement is powerfully productive in genre, method, and pedagogy. The presentation discusses the ways that CNF’s generativity derives from its liminality and argues that CNF develops student capacity to inhabit liminal spaces and derive the benefit of negative capability, perhaps more effectively than rhetoric-based models of composition instruction.

SPEAKER 5 (prompt): Performance (and Frame)
For this exercise we’ll generate titles as the first act of writing performance, using those titles to frame lists of rapid-fire details. For inspiration, we’ll skim two essays from Brevity—Brian Arundel’s “The Things I’ve Lost” and Gretchen Legler’s “Things That Appear Ugly or Troubling but Upon Closer Inspection Are Beautiful.” Students asked to do this essay have come up with such gems as: “Times I Wish My Car Had Broken Down” and “Relationships I’ve Lost Because We Kissed During the Wrong Scene of a Movie.”

SPEAKER 6 (prompt): The Microscope and the Telescope
Change the lens on a writing-in-progress. View the experience from a microscope: If there is skin, look at the pores; if there are leaves, study the veins. Change to the telescope: Leap from first person POV to third. Move from explaining the present to exploring the past or speculating on the future. Write an earth-bound experience from the vantage point of the moon. How do the lenses change what you offer the reader?

SPEAKER 7 (presentation): True Stories as Witness to the Human Condition
This presentation will examine common elements of true stories that witness to the human condition, using David Sedaris’s “Let It Snow” as a tragi-comic case in point. These stories, highly specific, yet universal, are about people on the edge. They are full of surprises, problems to solve, possibilities, resilience, advocacy, and hope, expressed through plot, characters, dialogue and action. Their life-saving power provides models for all to hear and tell their own.

SPEAKER 8 (prompt): Letter
Adapted from psychologist James Pennebaker’s work with expressive writing and healing, this prompt invites participants to write a letter to someone they have an intimate connection with such as a partner, family member, or close friend. Choose an unresolved conflict to immediately or eventually address in the letter. The conflict could be something smaller like stealing your sibling’s Halloween candy or larger like addressing an infidelity.

SPEAKER 9 (prompt): Sense Memory
We well know the power of the senses of smell and taste and their connection to memory: your grandmother’s perfume, fresh-mown lawns, chess pie, etc. What about the flip side of that scenario? How do smell and taste remind us of how we’ve evolved and what we’re glad to leave behind?

SPEAKER 10 (prompt): Performing Silence
Think of a time when you deliberately performed silence. Was your silence an act of resistance, or an expression of accord? Did it signal acquiescence, humility, compassion, distrust? Return to the moment with your body and the space it inhabited: where were you, and what were you doing? Zoom in: what was happening in your muscles, your gut? First describe the details that conveyed your silence’s meaning. Then, if you like, give direct voice to the words underneath that silence.

SPEAKER 11 (prompt): Spectacular Opera Performances: Do They Strike a Chord?
According to American composer Robert Starer, “The sung word is stronger than the spoken word. It evokes hard-to-reach places in the human soul.” After listening to two spectacular opera performances, see if they strike a chord with you. Does the sung word resonate with something in your soul? Given the plot and the opera characters’ plight, what might be shared human experiences? Do the characters remind you of a time when you were in a similar situation?

(W.05) Remixing Performance in Games

Sponsored by: Council for Play and Game Studies

Level: All

Cluster: Information Technologies

Abstract: Participants will explore theories of play and games emphasizing performance, remixing existing games to create new performances, and concluding with an escape room challenge.

Full description:

Similar to how academic writing demands students perform in strange and often uncomfortable ways, games demand performance of players. Within games, play, mechanics, and narrative intertwine to create a multi-layered ethos that players perform. As the embodiment of gameplay often elicits emotions from and between them, players come to empathize with (Isbister) or critically resist and subvert (Sicart) the specific subject positions and narratives that games create for them. But games have become so pervasive and commonplace that we hardly recognize how they support prevailing rhetorics of power. Nonetheless, even the simplest of games offer the means with which students not only develop their abilities to comprehend these power structures but also tactically subvert them. This remixing of games, in other words, demands that the students performthrough the processes of critical inquiry, interpretation, and presentation which in turn transfers to their composition practices.

To begin, workshop participants will briefly survey theories underpinning approaches to various types of performance in games. Play is typically divided into at least three identities or roles simultaneously occupied by players: a person playing a game (social role), a player working within the parameters of a game (player role), and a character in a world (performative role) (Fine; Hendricks; MacKay; Cover). These roles are determined and constrained by game mechanics, the operations and actions that are possible to perform in a game. Facilitators will encourage participants to analyze how these game elements convey rhetorical spaces and possible roles that players can perform through play.

As Ian Bogost argues in Persuasive Games, game procedures, specifically the mechanics and rules of gameplay, create embodied arguments for players. However, as Miguel Sicart notes, games create a dialectical interplay between procedural gameplay and the often ideologically-laden narrative worlds they represent. Changes made to game mechanics necessarily alter the messages they communicate and performances they evoke. In the next section of the workshop, small groups will collaborate on disrupting one of several games provided to them. In the game of tic-tac-toe, for example, how do familiarity and pattern recognition elicit performances that simulate the banal and “everyday”? How might we intervene in these simulations to disrupt the roles players perform? What narratives are evoked when the Xs and Os are replaced with other tokens? What tactics need to be reconfigured if we manipulate the familiar 3×3 grid? As a result, the interplay between the narrative world and the mechanics that enact its ideology thrusts players into a particular performative roleor ethos, similar to ancient Greek notions of ethos as habituated action (Hawhee; Holmes).

The second part of the workshop will consist of a stations-style breakout session, allowing participants to explore examples of classroom-ready games in action, each station guided by a facilitator or two. Specifically, we will make use of the full spectrum of games: live-action role playing games, tabletop role-playing games, augmented and virtual reality games, board games, card games, and mobile games. We will challenge participants to critically examine the game mechanics and the worlds they build at each station, then purposefully and meaningfully remix one game mechanic in order to create a new rhetorical world. Specifically, participants will re-envision how these mechanics can teach by embodying a particular ideological narrative world, but then we will introduce a critical disruption by introducing the idea of remix: asking them to use the same mechanic to embody a different ideological narrative or to use the same narrative to embody a different game mechanic. Through play, they will then investigate the types of performances their alterations encourage, and the group will reflect on their experiences. We will explore questions of how games elicit performance and perform upon players, focusing on cooperative performance and which performative qualities mesh effectively with writing. For instance, traditionally, tic-tac-toe is a game of dominance where one player tries to defeat the other by claiming a line of space first. What happens when the winner is destroying the claimed space with toxic chemicals? How could the goals and rules of the game change as a result? What happens when the winner is setting aside the space for a national park? How could players renegotiate the rules to make the game cooperative, freeing up more space for conversation?

Finally, we will conclude with an “escape the workshop” challenge that utilizes clues participants earn as they participate within the workshop, and in order to figure out the clues, they will have to perform the workshop’s themes of remix, creative thinking, and collaboration. Escape Rooms demonstrate the power of games that intensify play through the situational narrative of escape as well as demanding that players inhabit a role; at the very least they play as themselves trying to escape the room, but escape rooms can do much more world building to push players to take on other types of roles. As such, our escape room scenario will particularly emphasize the conference theme of performance. CCCC 2018 featured an Escape Room game themed around composition, and this was so well-received by our community, we want to involve that format in our workshop.

Sources/References to consider:
• Jesse Schell, The Art of Game Design + deck of lenses
• Tracy Fullerton, Game Design Workshop
• Katherine Isbister, How Games Move Us: Emotion By Design
• Jennifer Grouling Cover, The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games
• Douglas Eyman and Andrea Davis, Play/Write: Digital Rhetoric, Writing, Games
• Amy M. Green, Storytelling in Video Games: The Art of the Digital Narrative
• Debra Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece
• Steve Holmes, The Rhetoric of Games as Embodied Practice: Procedural Habits
• Miguel Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games
• Miguel Sicart, “Game, Player, Ethics: A Virtue Ethics Approach to Computer Games,” International Review of Information Ethics, 4, 13-18.
• Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames
• Mary Flanagan, Critical Play

(W.06) Lights, Camera, Action: Performance and Performing in Writing Center Origins

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Programs

Abstract: This workshop reviews creating, building, founding, and/or redesigning Writing Centers. Bedford St Martins is providing lunch and the St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors for all workshop participants.

Full description:

ACT I. Vision/Missions (9:00-9:45)
Session Performers: Performer 3, Performer 5, Performer 10
Just as a movie director has a vision for a screenplay, we need a vision for our centers. When we build a brand-new writing center, or significantly re-vision an existing writing center, creators can use vision/mission statements to represent and name the work the center performs for the campus community. This section of the workshop will focus on working with vision/mission statements, using campus-based research to craft the statements, thinking through ways to focus these statements, problematizing these performances of vision/mission by reviewing sample statements, and crafting our own new (or re-visioned) statements.

ACT II. Space (9:50-10:35)
Session Performers: Performer 1, Performer 8
Whether it’s a one-act play or the latest Oscar winner, the setting of a performance has an immediate effect on the audience. It prepares us for how to approach a given situation. The same holds true for our writing center spaces. When building a writing center from the ground up, what sort of design/aesthetic choices need to be made? This section will discuss some of the conversations that need to be had in designing a new writing center, as well as bring in scholarship to support the idea of a welcoming space. Participants will be able to work together to brainstorm how best to design their writing center space, while also considering common roadblocks like budgetary constraints and administrative pushback.

ACT III. Budget (10:40-11:25)
Session Performers: Performer 1, Performer 3
Budget performances can be Oscar winning or Rotten Tomato worthy. In this section, we will conduct some impromptu performances of identifying budget topics. Then, we will ask co-star audience participants to imagine themselves in A Field of Their Dreams where drama and fantasy collide into Writing Center budget episodes. We will work together to identify budgetary needs and find solutions to meet those needs that at least qualify as worthy mentions. Audience participants will receive handouts and worksheets to assist in their future independent performances.

ACT IV. Outreach (11:30-12:15)
Session Performers: Performer 6, Performer 9, Performer 10
Performance-rhetoric allows writing centers to think about outreach as “making our relations” with others across and beyond our campus communities. In this workshop segment, participants will continue to work with their vision/mission statements, identifying campus and community partners and common initiatives. We will explore the collaborative roles of advisory boards, WAC initiatives, and regional and international organizations. Through these discovery performances, we will consider how collaborative roles can shape or reshape our values. Audience participants will receive contact information for their regional and national/international organizations.

****INTERMISSION (Lunch Break (12:15-12:45))****
Lunch is hosted by Bedford/St. Martin’s
includes a copy of The St. Martin’s Sourcebook for Writing Tutors

ACT V. Tutors (12:45-1:30)
Session Performers: Performer 4, Performer 5
To have a great show, directors need performers. In the Writing Center Community Theater, our main performers are our tutors. ACT V will review tutor roles, the talents that tutors bring to their roles in collaborative learning, and the advantages and disadvantages of working with undergraduate peer tutors, graduate students, and professional tutors. With an eye towards diversity in casting (hiring), engaging tutoring as performance and hiring as casting, we will roleplay with workshop participants.

ACT IV. Tutor Training: (1:35-3:30)
Performers: Performer 1, Performer 4, Performer 5, Performer 7
Any good production is supported by a cast of thousands. Performers in ACT IV will consider how we direct our resources and relationships to support tutor education and training. How can we leverage university partnerships. As with any script writing workshop, Performers and audience participants will discuss scripts that include climactic performances, such as: collaborative partnering between high school and university Writing Centers, options for initial training and for sustaining quality writing tutoring (with and without partners) and certification opportunities.

ACT VII. Assessment (3:35-4:45)
Session Performers: Performer 1, Performer 2, Performer 5
Engage and leverage your writing center data. Learning to perform the role of resource advocate for your center is often learned on the job for many writing center directors. Come participate in an interactive session that focuses on developing measurable learning outcomes, building annual reports that effectively tell your center’s story, and training tutors to create post session narratives that highlight the work they do in meaningful ways. Learning the dance of the annual report and how to choreograph your data moves you closer to the BIG TIME.

(W.07) Co-Exploring International Writing Research and Rehearsing Scholarly Performances

Sponsored by: International Researchers Consortium

Level: All

Cluster: Research

Abstract: Thirty-two writing scholars from 20 countries co-explore and rehearse in-process research projects and their complex cultural, political, and linguistic contexts.

Full description:

Our performances as writing scholars involve more than just composing and publishing research. We must also engage with diverse traditions, methods, and theories from around the globe. Complex cultural, political, and linguistic contexts often complicate these performances. That said, writing scholars rarely have an open space to “rehearse” with each other across these contexts. In this workshop, participants will enter dialogic conversations to give and receive rich feedback on their research and deeply reflect on higher education writing research from around the world. The design of this workshop also allows scholars to interact with audiences not always accessible during the writing process. Scholars studying writing in different languages are welcomed, especially those typically underrepresented in the field.

This workshop is made up of 32 writing researchers, who will be designated as workshop facilitators. In advance of the workshop, 27 of the facilitators will share works-in-progress with a brief explanation of theoretical, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Each facilitator and all additional registrants will read the works-in-progress and choose 5 before attending the workshop. Then each facilitator will lead a table discussion on their piece. All perspectives will be explored on equal footing with other “embodied performances” and potential audiences. The facilitator-participants will rehearse their current findings and questions, encounter many international perspectives, and perform as both agents and audiences throughout the day. Throughout the workshop, all participants will foster deep engagement with each other’s work and discuss various avenues for publication.

The projects represent new developments in writing studies from Bangladesh, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Germany, Ireland, Jordan, South Korea, KSA, Lebanon, Pakistan, Philippines, South Asia, Syria, Sweden, Scotland, UAE, UK, and US . The 21 projects and 32 writing researchers from diverse national, cross-national, disciplinary, and multilingual contexts form the heart of the workshop exchanges. In other words, these projects and how they interrelate throughout the day will be the content of this workshop. The workshop chairs will provide the framework for these discussions and guide them towards overall themes and future applications. Understanding how different methodologies “perform” in various projects will be a key focus. Some of the represented methodologies include genre theory, archival research, interviews and surveys with students and faculty in specific contexts, corpus analysis, microgenetic analysis of student writing, analysis of institutional policy documents, ethnographic approaches to disciplines, participatory action research, and digital tracking.
Workshop goals

The workshop includes 3 interactive activities, 2 to be completed before the CCCC.

First, by January, workshop facilitators post the following on a wiki (see http://compfaqs.org/CompFAQsInternational/InternationalWritingStudies):

-A draft research text, description of the rhetorical situation of the work, and glossary of context/culture-specific terms to be used at the workshop.
-A digest of key theorists and methods and rationale for their use.
-A “public” abstract of the project for non-expert audiences.

Second, the texts are grouped into 6 clusters of 3-4 projects on the wiki.

From January to March, workshop participants (facilitators and any additional registrants) choose a text from each cluster to read closely, freeing workshop time for real dialogue. A video chat event between January and the CCCC allows participants to get to know each other.

Third, all facilitators will join small group discussions at CCCC with each selected author/text across the day. When not leading their own group, facilitators become audiences for other registrants. Everyone encounters current, ongoing writing research, research questions, and emergent or well-established methods from several countries. Each project receives attentive and sustained discussion, as participants question assumptions, negotiate tensions and differences, and model practices that resist simple dichotomies. As the workshop progresses, facilitators will construct a collective sense of possible responses to the shared performances of the day.

Morning session
9:00-9:15 Introduction
9:15-10:00 Small-group discussions, 1st cluster of texts
10:00-10:15 Break
10:15-11:00 Small-group discussions, 2nd cluster
11:00-11:45 Small-group discussions, 3rd cluster
11:45-12:30 Whole-group discussion, sharing notes from clusters

Afternoon session
1:30-1:45 Review of the morning discussion.
1:45-2:30 Small-group discussions, 4th cluster
2:30-2:45 Break
2:45-3:30 Small-group discussions, 5th cluster
3:30-4:15 Small-group discussions, 6th cluster
4:15-5:00 Final discussion: How do we define performance in our research and how do we bring that research to new audiences?

Chairs’ Focus Questions
To engage with conference themes, the workshop chairs keep track of threads and look for connections with these questions:

How are different theories and methodologies embodied in specific cultural, linguistic, and social contexts?

What kinds of performances are available globally and across cultures?

What kinds of performances among different research subjects and stakeholders are hidden in the research we do?

How do local settings shape the teaching and research of writing?

How can international communities of writing scholars best perform together with the texts and contexts of higher education while working towards responsible mutual engagement?

How can we help each other disseminate our research in ways that can transform our performances in the broader field of writing research?

The workshop promises a deep collaborative performance across international contexts, engaging projects and people in sensitive, responsible, and productive ways.

(W.08) Developing an Indigenous Scholarly Practice: An Indigenous Rhetorics Research and Writing Retreat

Sponsored by: Caucus for American Indian Scholars and Scholarship

Level: All

Cluster: Research

Abstract: This workshop, sponsored by the Caucus for American Indian Scholars and Scholarship, is designed to introduce Indigenous theories, practices, and approaches to research and writing.

Full description:

Rationale:
The practice of Indigenous rhetorics (alphabetic, visual, digital, performative, oral, and material) is positioned at the meeting grounds between Rhetoric & Composition and American Indian studies. Scholars of Indigenous rhetorics are concerned with complicated questions about the relationships between power, history, knowledge-making, literacy, and language. As scholars of Indigenous rhetorics, decoloniality guides our research and writing as we seek to provide additional options to rhetorical production and are invested in decolonial movements. Indigenous rhetorics scholarship, research methodologies, and narrative approaches are ultimately used for decolonial and social justice work. In this full-day workshop, we will hold an Indigenous rhetorics writing and research retreat that will make space for those who are interested in learning more about Indigenous rhetorics and the narrative and methodological approaches related to Indigenous theories and worldviews. In many ways, this workshop responds to Vershawn A. Young’s acknowledgement that there is a dominant assumption that rhetoric is simply “words.” In this workshop, participants will understand how to develop an Indigenous rhetorics scholarly practice that is embodied, relational, rooted in the land, in practice, and ancestral.

Since we believe that our entire discipline can benefit from implementing Indigenous practices, approaches, and methodologies, we see this workshop as a “research retreat” where scholar-teachers from all backgrounds can learn about various forms of Indigenous knowledge-making, practice these forms of knowledge-making, and discuss ways to approach Indigenous forms of research in their teaching.

Focus:
This workshop, sponsored by the Caucus for American Indian Scholars and Scholarship, is designed to introduce key theories, practices, and orientations to Indigenous approaches to researching and writing.

The goals of this workshop are: 1) for participants to develop a deeper understanding of the possible roles that Indigenous rhetorics can play in their research, writing, and teaching through a series of presentations and hands-on activities focused on relational accountability, storying as methodology, rhetorical listening, and acknowledgement of embodied differences. 2) To support participants as they begin to develop and apply a foundation of Indigenous writing and research methodologies to use in their research and decolonial and social justice oriented pedagogy. 3) To discuss the ways that the stories we share develop our theoried worlds, weave together agents in diverse worldviews, and develop meaningful relationships that seek to sustain our knowledge-making communities through Indigenous rhetorical practices. 4) To frame performance-composition through Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies with/in embodied practices that are relational, responsible, and reflective.

We’ll accomplish these goals in three ways: 1) by providing intellectual contexts to anchor activities for the workshop; 2) by providing hands-on learning opportunities and activities for participants aimed directly at strategies for incorporating Indigenous text makings and practices that acknowledge embodiment as an important part of relational accountability for scholars working with/in Indigenous rhetorics; and 3) by modelling storying as methodology alongside rhetorical listening as important practices within Indigenous rhetorics. This learning-based workshop, then, focuses on the needs of our participants by providing them with opportunities to work with experienced scholars of Indigenous rhetorics. In addition, we’ll supply a wide array of resources for participants to develop ways they may want to incorporate these embodied practices responsibly into their research and pedagogy.

Activities/Sequence:
This full-day workshop begins the way that scholarship in Indigenous rhetorics begins with the history and language of the peoples on whose lands we’re located – the Indigenous peoples of Pennsylvania. This context is necessary in order to understand the work of Indigenous rhetorics as always already anchored in the cultures, beliefs, and worldviews lived in Indigenous spaces. During these 20-minute presentations, facilitators will provide crucial information for each topic and then invite participants to engage in the knowledge-making practice related to the topic or model.

Speaker 1 – Getting Started with Indigenous Rhetorics: Key Words and Concepts
Foundational to practicing Indigenous rhetorics is knowing and understanding key words and concepts associated with them. Drawing on the work of rhetoric, composition, education, and American Indian Studies scholars, workshop participants will work through naming, defining, and giving shape to terms and concepts through examples situated in historic and current Indigenous contexts. While not exhaustive, this substantive review lays groundwork for workshop sessions that follow.

Speaker 2 – Positionality and Orientations to Indigenous Forms of Research
Facilitators will discuss how our positionality/orientation to the Indigenous communities we work with reflects or challenges how research was historically conducted within Indigenous communities. By looking at how different writers identify their positionality/orientation and its influence on their research, we will explore how this affects our research, methodologies, and practices.

Speaker 3 – Understanding Community: Relational Accountability, Reciprocity, and Respect
Workshop participants will discuss the intricacies of building relationships with Indigenous communities (their rhetorics and ways of being) and will discuss how to implement various kinds of community-based research and methodologies, including research and classroom practice.

Speaker 4 – Cherokee Doubleweaving
In a move to bridge material rhetorics, stories, epistemologies, and methodologies, we will include a hands-on activity that will guide attendees as they create Cherokee double-walled baskets, specifically highlighting the embodied praxis of interdisciplinary scholarly and pedagogical conversations (Driskill, 2010) as a way to collaborate by disrupting colonial knowledge-making.

Speaker 5 – Story as Methodology
Presenters will provide multiple examples of what it looks like to build story as a methodology. We will ask participants to write a story about a research experience and then discuss how to use it in a publication as the theoretical framing.

Schedule:
History of Indigenous peoples of Pennsylvania, 8:00am-8:15am
Getting started with Indigenous rhetorics: key words and concepts 8:20am-8:40am
Activity: Getting started with Indigenous rhetorics: 8:45am-9:15am
Break: 9:20am-9:30am
Positionality and Orientations to Indigenous forms of research, 9:35am-9:55am
Activity: Positionality and Orientations to Indigenous forms of research, 10:00am-10:30am
Break, 10:35 am-10:45 am
Understanding community: relational accountability, reciprocity, and respect, 10:50am – 11:10am
Activity, Understanding community, 11:20am – 11:40am
Pre-lunch reflection, 11:45am-noon
Lunch: 12-1pm
Cherokee doubleweaving, 1:00pm-1:20pm
Activity, Cherokee doubleweaving , 1:25pm-2:00pm
Break: 2:00pm-2:15pm
Story as methodology. 2:20pm-2:40pm
Activity: Story as methodology, 2:45pm-3:15pm
Break: 3:15pm-3:30pm
Small group brainstorming and project development, 3:30pm-4:30pm
Closing and Reflection, 4:45pm-5:00pm

(W.09) Establishing a Community of Inquiry in Online Writing Courses through Student and Instructor Presence

Sponsored by: Online Writing Instruction Standing Group

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: This workshop aids instructors in establishing a successful Community of Inquiry (CoI) within their online classes.

Full description:

In this workshop, we will help instructors establish a Community of Inquiry (CoI) within their online classes. The establishment of a CoI aids in the construction of deep and meaningful knowledge among all who participate in the communication practices of the community when the CoI is established through an interaction of three presences: teaching, social, and cognitive (Swan, Garrison, & Richardson, 2009). Instructors must establish their own presence while simultaneously encouraging students to be more present in the online medium; the combination of the two facilitates cognitive presence and deeper engagement and learning. A fourth element in the CoI framework, as posited by Akyol and Garrison (2011), is assessment insofar as the authors suggest that instructors need to focus on assessing student learning outcomes in order to understand the depth of learning that occurs with interactive and collaborative approaches to teaching online. Thus, we add the fourth element of assessment as a way for instructors to assess student learning through projects they create and in-depth reflections they write on course outcomes.

Much of the scholarship provides context for a CoI framework in online settings (Garrison, Anderson, and Archer 2010); to continue the conversation, we suggest that technology can enhance these four elements. Instructors can establish presence through screencapture feedback (Stannard 2007; Siegel, 2006), synchronous video (Cho & Tobias, 2016), and multimodal instructional tools (Bourelle, 2017; Rubin, Fernandes, & Avgerinou, 2013), designing the course in such a way that students are interacting with one another through the use of similar technological tools. However, this argument presupposes that instructors not only know how to scaffold the classroom and use technology appropriately, but to first know how to use the technology to develop such an approach and to then to assess student-created multimodal compositions. As such, this workshop focuses on: 1) helping instructors develop presence through technology, test-driving low-stakes software (Jing or Screencast-O-Matic); 2) helping students establish presence through using similar software in collaborative learning spaces; 3) engaging students with course content using technology to aid in collaborative exploration, inquiry, and reflection; and 4) assessment of student learning as evidenced in their multimodal projects as a way to support student learning and curricular redesign. Upon completion of the workshop, attendees will leave with concrete instructional tools and actionable items they can implement in their online classes.

The CoI Framework in Writing Studies: (Plenary, 15 minutes)

Our plenary speaker will introduce participants to the CoI Framework, describing how the framework has been researched and employed in online and blended learning contexts. She will reflect on the potential for using this framework as a heuristic for designing and assessing online writing courses, sharing data from previous and ongoing mixed methods studies that investigate the extent to which blended and online writing courses function as CoIs. She will conclude with a discussion of the relationship between instructional design and tool selection, inviting participants to share their own experiences with engaging students in technology-mediated learning environments.

Presentation 1: Instructor Presence (1 hour)
Arguably, the instructor’s presence is the greatest departure from the traditional classroom that online writing instruction (OWI) creates—a point emphasized by research that shows that instructor presence is the feature of asynchronous online education that students miss most. Therefore, online writing instructors often develop strategies to compensate for their absence, such as participating in discussion board assignments, posting videos of themselves, using synchronous video, and providing feedback in various ways, including multimedia, on student work. In this presentation, we will explain the importance of instructor presence and instructor absence by working with the participants to understand what we need to be present for and how we can help students learn in our absence.

Coffee Break: 15 minutes

Presentation 2: Student Presence (1 hour)
In this presentation, the facilitators will offer examples of how to provide opportunities for student presence in the digital environment, in addition to seeking input from participants about practices they have implemented to build student presence online. We will look to complicate the discussion, however, by considering the implications of building student presence, especially where that might involve audio/video/image created by the student, and/or where presence-building activities move students into less common LMS tools or outside of the LMS entirely. What are the implications for accessibility? For privacy? And how do we align student presence building with course objectives that perhaps make no mention of such activities?

Lunch Break 12-1:30

Presentation 3: Cognitive Presence (1 hour)
In this presentation, the facilitators will discuss how to engage students with course content using synchronous technology to aid in collaborative exploration, inquiry, and reflection. While much scholarship examines asynchronous communication, particularly the use of discussion forums in OWI (Cho & Tobias, 2016; Wright & Street, 2007), this presentation will focus on other technologies, particularly those that allow for synchronous communication to support cognitive presence (Rockinson-Szapkiw, Wendt, Whighting, & Nisbet, 2016). We will look at online courses delivered via synchronous video conference as well as an asynchronous online writing class that provides synchronous options (e.g., Zoom and Google Hangouts) for student-student interaction as well as student-instructor interaction.

Coffee Break: 15 minutes

Presentation 4: Assessment (1 hour)
In this presentation, the facilitators will talk through how to assess multimodal projects, reflections, and eportfolios in ways that support student learning and curricular design within the online CoI. We will showcase student projects and corresponding rubrics, leading the audience through a discussion of providing effective summative and formative feedback throughout the students’ composing process (Borton and Huot, 2009). We will also discuss how to assign and use reflection as a way to assess students’ projects, using Shipka’s (2011) Statements of Goals and Choices (SOGCs) as a framework. Lastly, we will discuss using White’s (2005) idea of in-depth reflections to guide students’ self-evaluation within eportfolios.

Reflection/Entire Group Discussion (30 minutes, 5-minute reflection/25-minute discussion)
In a final reflection with the entire group, we will discuss how attendees will enact what they learned in their own classes.

(W.10) Performing Rhetorical Activism: Latinxs in the Community and in the Academy

Sponsored by: NCTE/CCCC Latinx Caucus

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: This workshop continues the Latinx Caucus’s tradition of cultivating critical dialogue between Latinx scholars of rhetoric, writing, and literacy and our activists in Pittsburgh.

Full description:

This workshop continues the Latinx Caucus’s tradition of cultivating critical dialogue between Latinx scholars of rhetoric, writing, and literacy (including allies) and our activist counterparts in the Convention’s host city. Individual members of the Caucus will each introduce a Latinx group or organization from the Pittsburgh community. Each will discuss and present its work, methods, and history. These discussions will be followed by conversations among all workshop participants–speakers and enrollees–on the following subjects:

Bridging gaps between academic and activist work.

Developing the existing intersections of academic and activist work.

Exploring possibilities for future interaction between the two.

Using scholarship, art, and protest in to counter the current administration’s attacks on Latinxs.

Devising pedagogies that empower students and educators in light of the acute political precarity of the current moment.

Local and area groups to whom our speakers will reach out to include in the workshop:

Cafe con Leche Latino Artists Residency Program in Pittsburgh

Casa San Jose

Latino Community Center Pittsburgh

Past workshops have included poetry and fiction readings by authors from the Houston-based publisher Arte Público, presentations and testimonials by DREAMER and DACA activists, and an interactive presentation by Portland-based graffiti artist Hector Hernandez. It is too soon to tell which of the above groups (and others) will be available to participate in the workshop. The groups that do end up on the program will largely determine the substance of the conversations. Caucus members—and others—who sign up for the workshop will seek first to listen, and only then to work collaboratively with the groups to address the issues listed above. Caucus members will also do mini-workshops/presentations on their research.

Afternoon Workshops

Wednesday, March 13, 2019 – 1:30 to 5:00 p.m.

(AW.01) “Grantwriting and Community Engagement Pedagogy: How to Create and Adapt a Course for Your Particular Milieu”

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: Facilitators will introduce grant-writing pedagogy through the lens of ethics and social justice, then move participants towards designing a course adapted to their particular communities.

Full description:

In this workshop, facilitators will share our experiences with grantwriting pedagogy, then move participants towards considering how to design a course within the particular context of their communities at two and four year colleges and universities. The workshop will engage participants at every turn in relation to pedagogy, social justice, and the ethics of community engagement; we will aim to expand their expectations of what student writing can accomplish.

In “The Community Grant Writing Project: A Flexible Service-Learning Model,” (Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement, 2014; 18:1), Courtney Stevens lays out one potential structure for grantwriting pedagogy based on her work at Williamette in writing intensive first year seminars (263): her students in a Poverty and Public Policy themed course volunteered 12 hours a semester with Habitat for Humanity and Farmworker Housing Development Corporation while then providing “grant writing materials…[and] research and narratives for prospective grant proposals (267). The community engagement office at Williamette helped Stevens identify and interview partners, then partners visited three times: first, to present an assignment description to students, second, to present drafts, and third to finalize and reflect. Students also wrote in other genres related to the course and wrote a “traditional term paper.”

While Stevens’ model worked well for her, we recognize that because each university and each instructor differs so greatly from one to the other, we want to extend the range of possible manifestations of a grantwriting course. For this reason, we will offer a workshop that encourages participants to construct a model that is unique to the specific needs of their communities and that takes into consideration the teaching of cultural competence as a necessary core to this pedagogy. Some of our workplaces, surprisingly, still don’t have the support of a community engagement office. In other contexts, grantwriting works better as a component in an upper level or graduate course. In others still, service learning where students travel to sites just isn’t feasible with the constraints of the curriculum.

Grant writing also provides composition instructors with a unique intersection between the twin themes of performance rhetoric and composition. Because grant readers (reviewers, awards committees at nonprofit organizations) represent a finite, specific, knowable audience, the grant application is a tangible rhetorical act. Additionally, the grantwriting process is an embodied performance intended to persuade an audience to act on the presented idea–to award the proposers a sum of money to enable them to perform specific actions. A culminating performance is often when students get the chance to lead work meetings with outside contstituents or when guest speakers, who present on content that reflects their writing, embody the research they’ve been working so hard on.

The multi-institutional and interdisciplinary work of this workshop takes the stance that privilege is meant to be shared, and that this act of sharing takes a lifetime of effort; thus, we believe that not only students–but we must also position ourselves in relation to the “other” or to those who have less privilege than we do (urban middle-schoolers in the City, refugees, etc.). The work of grantwriting pedagogy is centered around the historical and contemporary connections between university and community in the sense that writing is practiced as a way to advocate for full and equal participation of all groups. We acknowledge the legacies of injustice in our regions, we acknowledge our privileges, and we see how the work we do can have a positive impact on our collective futures. The curriculum ideas we discuss balance the practical aspects of workplace writing with theorizing and reflecting specifically on the social and cultural climate of our homes, what NPOs do there, why they do it, and on writing in relation to our communities, advocacy, and altruism. We believe in partnering with at least 50% organizations that not only serve people of diverse backgrounds but that are led by those folks as well.

Facilitator One created and runs a project at Towson University called Grantwriting In Valued Environments (G.I.V.E.), a university supported project of the English Department, that advances students’ professional writing goals by connecting their coursework to the writing needs of small non-profit organizations in the Baltimore/Washington region. Students so far have raised $173,530 all going directly to NPOs; we just submitted our largest grant of $300,000. Regularly, students also participate through internships, independent studies, and part-time paid employment. Facilitator One also leads Intergroup Dialogue workshops and is a vocal advocate for racial and social justice on campus.

Facilitator Two began teaching grant writing at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi in 2005. Originally offered as a special topics class, Grant Writing developed into a stand-alone course and is taught at the undergraduate level and at the graduate level in both the English and Masters of Public Administration programs. It also was the genesis of a Writing for Nonprofits certificate program in the English department. Grant Writing is offered in both “face to face” and in online programs. Students and faculty have partnered with a variety of nonprofit agencies and have written funded grant applications totaling more than $700,000 on behalf of various agencies.

Facilitator Three, a renowned Disability Studies scholar, will model that relative newbie experience in terms of grantwriting pedagogy and talk about teaching a hybrid grant-writing and creative writing course.

(AW.02) Handcrafted Rhetorics: DIY and the Public Power of Made Things

Sponsored by: Handcrafted Rhetorics SIG

Level: All

Cluster: Community, Civic & Public

Abstract: Work with local artist-educators at a Pittsburgh makerspace to reconsider activist and pedagogical practices in composition.

Full description:

Attention to makerspaces and interest in leveraging their energy and practices are now well-established in Rhetoric and Composition. In these open, community-based production facilities, members not only share machines, rooms, and materials, but also work under an ethos of distributed knowledge and cooperatively-taught skills. Such DIY spaces are now commonplace in many US cities, including Pittsburgh. Having run locally-attuned workshops at CCCC in 2015 (Tampa) and 2017 (Portland), in 2018 (Kansas City) we left the convention space and ran the Handcrafted Rhetorics workshop (handcraftedrhetorics.org) at Print League (https://www.printleaguekc.com/), a community print shop. After successfully navigating the logistics of an off-site workshop—and hearing from our participants about how important such a change in venue was—we propose to again take participants into our host city, to a Pittsburgh makerspace.

Over the last several years, scholars and practitioners in our field alike have turned to histories and theories of craft, making, multimodal rhetoric, cultural rhetorics, and (post)process-oriented pedagogies to consider the ways that 21st century composers create/make/labor under particular conditions and with/in particular environments (Farmer, 2013; Prins, 2012; Palmeri, 2012; Sheridan, Ridolfo, and Michel, 2012; Shipka, 2011; Brown & Rivers, 2013). As part of that conversation, DIY and craft must be understood as concepts that have the potential to circulate through streams of radical and entrepreneurial rhetorics; that is, as a form of risk that is deeply embedded within capitalism, DIY and handcrafted composition can be scripted as acts of free-market logic or as transgressive—even revolutionary—public performance. Sometimes these two scripts get entangled within each other.

As such, we are teaming up with area makers, including Dr. Melissa Rogers, a local educator and artist who works with Pittsburgh arts organizations and nonprofits like Assemble (assemblepgh.org), Prototype (https://prototypepgh.com), and the Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse (http://pccr.org/), to structure a workshop that uses handcrafted rhetorics as a means for attention seeking (Mueller), embodying composition for public spaces in ways that challenge the dominant institutions that often seek to standardize, shape, and direct them (Richardson). In Pittsburgh, for instance, artists have been fighting union-busting tactics from area museums, struggling to challenge traditional positions that nonprofits don’t have money to pay artists. As such, teaching artists are an underpaid, overworked, and often feminized pool of labor that many cities rely on to fuel their culture industries and, concurrently, gentrification.

This hands-on workshop will present participants with an opportunity to engage with a cross-section of DIY practitioners—compositionists, artists, teachers, feminists, activists, and librarians—to address the inequalities perpetuated by the neoliberalization of the arts and humanities. In this way, this workshop brings members of our field together with teacher-artists to engage in craft activism — through yarnbombing, banner hangings, subversive cross-stitch, or zine creation (to name just a few possibilities). Our previous workshops have taught us that such participation engenders important dialogue through the act of making in response to local and national exigencies; in this case, we will use handcrafted rhetorics to address specific injustices but also as a means for thinking through broader questions such as:

-Are arts or other maker-approaches education recognized as a performance of labor? Likewise, how could performance render such labor more visible?
-How might we, in DIY fashion, compose new social and political movements in real time with what we make with our hands?
-How could we compose against, perform against, the exploitation of our own and other people’s arts and activist labor?
-How can we help to change the rhetoric of making/teaching art as a “labor of love,” or what critical librarian Fobazi Ettarh (2018) has dubbed “vocational awe” (http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/)?

Schedule:
1:30 p.m. – Meet at space; introduce people and tools
2:15 p.m. – Making
3:45 p.m. – Break
4-5:00 p.m. – Discuss the questions above, and also how to take these conversations back to our institutions and communities.

Our goals for this workshop include:
-developing a better understanding of DIY crafting, art, and making practices as labor, and of the work that community arts leaders do in cities like Pittsburgh, articulating some of the ways in which educators, craft practitioners, artists, and makers might productively balance activism and complicity within neoliberalizing cultural institutions
-exploring the relationships between performance, rhetoric, and composition as they are enacted within some of the communities of practice that comprise maker and/or making cultures
-fostering local, participatory crafts activism and political dialogue through hands-on activities that engage Pittsburgh’s built environment and physical spaces.

(AW.03) Bridging the Semiotic Channels: Teaching Discussion and Oral Performance in the Writing Classroom

Level: All

Cluster: First-Year and Advanced Composition

Abstract: This half-day workshop will offer new strategies for encouraging students’ oral participation and for creating more complex and recursive relationships between writing and oral performance.

Full description:

Noting the ways that performance studies can inform rhetorical studies, Bernadette Marie Calafell asserts that performance, “works against dominant conceptions of knowledge by locating itself in and theorizing through the body. […] It embodies and drives a sustained critique of discourse” (116). Building on the potential that Calafell observes, this workshop will consider the methodologies behind the most literally embodied form of discourse that students undergo in our courses: oral classroom participation.

Such a consideration is long overdue, given the enormous role that oral performance plays in students’ classroom experience. In terms of the day-to-day labor we expect students to perform in our classrooms, time spent speaking and listening likely exceeds everything else, including writing. However, relatively few instructors teach students to think about oral participation in the same nuanced terms that we think about writing. Instead, we expect students to teach themselves the genres and objectives of oral discourse and to develop their methods of engagement reflexively, rather than reflectively.

In this workshop, we will examine students’ oral participation as a category of classroom performance that is separate from, but related to, performance in text. Among the key questions we will examine together are:

• How can we teach students to develop and deploy a nuanced set of oral skills in the classroom?
• How can we use textual performance to inspire new kinds of oral performance?
• How can we use technology to change the way students’ written and oral discourses intersect in the classroom?
• How can we use oral performance strategically to engage and accommodate all students, especially students who have been resistant to or uncomfortable with traditional classroom discourses?

The workshop will be structured in three segments, each designed to highlight a critical issue in student oral participation and model pedagogies that presenters have developed to address these issues. In corresponding breakout sessions, participants will have a chance to discuss these pedagogies and offer suggestions of their own. Participants will complete the workshop with new ideas about strategies and assignments that encourage successful oral performance in the writing classroom.

Workshop Agenda

Opening Free Write: 10 min
We will open the session by asking participants to jot down their responses to three questions:
1. What forms of oral performance do you expect student to perform in your classroom?
2. How do these forms of oral performance serve the objectives of your course?
3. What particular skills do students need to participate successfully in these activities?

Session 1: Locating Oral Performance in the Curriculum

Presentation 1 (20 min):
Speaker 1 will discuss the existing scholarship on students’ oral participation, with special emphasis on the disparity between the purposes that students and teachers assign to oral participation and the means we use to teach and assess it. Survey data indicates that both students and faculty define oral participation in complex, multi-genre terms, but instructors rarely teach discussion skills in this way, and both teachers and students tend to evaluate oral participation purely in terms of how many students speak and how often. Speaker 1 will conclude by suggesting a curriculum for teaching oral skills that parallels the methods of the Teaching for Transfer curriculum in FYC.

Breakout 1 (30 min):
In this session, participants will discuss the particular ways that students’ oral participation manifests in their classrooms and the particular skills that students need to participate successfully. This session will also model a game-based approach to class discussion developed by Presenter 1.

Session 2: Using “Social Annotation” to Connect Writing and Speech

Presentation 2 (20 min):
Presenter 2 will introduce “social annotation” as a practice that can bridge the gap between “classroom discussion” and formal academic prose. Beginning with the oft-cited Burkean metaphor of “the [scholarly, academic] conversation,” they will pose a series of questions: Can we make that metaphor more concrete by making the text’s margins a place where multiple student voices enter into dialogue? What happens to “conversation as performance” when we work online, where contemporary students’ experience of the self as performed is most acute? How can the mediating stage of social annotation help transfer the skills addressed by presentation #1 to more formal student writing?

Breakout 2 (30 min):
The technology of choice for this session, hypothesis.is, generates shared “margins” via a server where annotations keyed to specific elements of a text are hosted, turning anything from readings on a course website to articles on the open web into annotatable texts. Working in groups, participants will be introduced to social annotation technologies; they will then model an annotation-as-discussion exercise that proposes ways the particular moves characteristic of social annotation can inform face-to-face discussion.

Session 3: Multimodal Arguments, Performance, and Student Engagement

Presentation 3 (20 minutes):
Informed by Andrea Lunsford’s argument that Everything’s an Argument, Speaker 3 will address student performance of argument in alternative, nontraditional, and multimodal formats. Oral performance not only works to help scaffold student skills toward particular writing goals, but also functions as a culminating point in a writing course when students use it to demonstrate what they have learned from/about argument writing. Students first translate and then perform, as part of an oral presentation, an argument in a format other than a writing assignment. Additionally, providing all students an opportunity to create and perform argument in a non-traditional format is an inclusive strategy that invites students who may not write well, who might not enjoy writing, or who experience writing as anxiety producing, a way to demonstrate their understanding of how to construct and support an argument in a format they can perform well. Incorporating such performative strategies, formats, genres, and modalities opens argument up to a wide array of cultural influences and forms representative of all students’ backgrounds and experiences.

Breakout 3 (30 minutes):
Speaker 3 will share digital assignment and representative student projects that perform arguments, and invite participants to share examples from their teaching, Participants can begin, individually or collaboratively, to imagine non-traditional, oral, performative versions of writing assignments they assign in their courses as non-written ‘texts’ that perform the same functions as written essays, and that better demonstrate commitments to inclusive pedagogies.

(AW.04) Performing Anti-Racist Practices at the Writing Program, Departmental, and Institutional Levels and Beyond: Combating Linguistic Racism

Sponsored by: The Language Policy Committee

Level: All

Cluster: Language

Abstract: This workshop will develop a course of action that will embolden the participants to combat linguistic racism at different levels, within and outside academia.

Full description:

Language diversity, language attitudes, and multilingualism are at the center stage of students’ performance as writers, rhetoricians, and communicators in higher education and in a global market. Faculty and writing program administrators play a role in this performance as well. We see the need of supporting and honoring students’ home languages and recognizing the value of linguistic differences as a resource in students’ learning. Lovejoy, Fox, and Weeden (2018) remind us of the underlying values of policies such as “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” when they address the importance of understanding “that the diverse linguistic experiences and abilities students bring with them to writing courses represent a strength, a resource, not a deficit or a barrier” (326). Language differences are a resource, and we must not only create awareness of this but also seek and apply anti-racist practices within and beyond the writing classroom. Performing the teaching of rhetoric and writing requires the performance of anti-racist teaching practices. Discriminating against people for their language is linguistic racism. Only until changes are made at the program, departmental, and institutional levels and beyond can we indeed claim to value language diversity as performers/rhetoric and performers/composition. Only until we work towards these changes can we ensure that what we value in education will be sustained, and only then can we conquer linguistic racism.

In this half-day workshop, we have a major purpose: To work together with participants in discussing how as performers/rhetoric and performers/composition we can combat linguistic racism. We will seek answers to questions such as: What can we do as faculty to transform perceptions of cultural and linguistic literacies and language differences? What can we do as writing program administrators? As university and college administrators? As community members? What are specific anti-racist practices that we can apply in the classroom, the writing program, the department, the institution, the workplace, and the community?

Part I: Performing Anti-Racist Practices at the Program, Departmental, and Institutional Levels
This part of the workshop will focus on the need of performing anti-racist practices at the writing program, departmental, and institutional levels. We will begin by having participants share with us what their institution is like, their institutional context, and what their writing programs consist of. We will address how a multilevel approach can include aspects such as language policies within departments. Others could be: first-year experience programs, writing certificate programs, learning communities, the Writing Center, service-learning projects, and university events. From this discussion, we will move to a group activity. If possible, a short video will be presented, showing educators/scholars performing some type of linguistic justice work.

Activity 1 (small groups): Participants and LPC (Language Policy Committee) members will work in groups and brainstorm possible practices that can be implemented in First-Year and other Writing Programs and at the departmental and institutional levels to stop linguistic racism. Large Post-It Sheets will be used to list these practices. These will be placed on the wall, and each group will present their findings.

Part II: Performing Anti-Racist Practices in the Workplace and the Community
This part of the workshop will center on presenting strategies for combating linguistic racism in the workplace and the community. Examples could include community events, policies, and trainings. A group activity will follow. If possible, a short video will be presented, showing community members performing some type of linguistic justice work.

Activity 2 (small groups): Participants and LPC members will work in groups and brainstorm possible anti-racist linguistic practices that can be implemented in the workplace and the community. Large Post-It Sheets will be used to list these practices. These sheets will be placed on the wall, and each group will present their findings.

After having a discussion of all the listed practices, we will summarize the major findings. We will conclude our workshop with one final activity that will be shared with the group as a whole.

Activity 3 (individual): Each participant will write down ONE practice or strategy he/she will implement in the next year to combat linguistic racism at any of the levels discussed in the workshop. The goal is to create a course of action, a plan that will embolden the participants to combat linguistic racism at different levels, within and outside academia.

Proposed Schedule:

1:30-1:45 p.m. – Introductions, Purpose of Workshop, Overview

1:45-2:10 p.m. – Part I – Performing Anti-Racist Practices at the Program, Departmental, and Institutional Levels
2:10-2:30 p.m. – Small group activity (Activity 1)
2:30-2:50p.m. – Groups report on their findings/proposed practices and strategies
2:50-3:00 p.m. – Large group discussion on anti-racist practices at the program, departmental, and institutional levels

3:00-3:10 p.m. Break

3:10-3:20 p.m. – Part II – Performing Anti-Racist Practices in the Workplace and the Community
3:20- 3:40 p.m. – Small group activity (Activity 2)
3:40-4:00 p.m. – Groups report on their findings/proposed practices and strategies
4:00-4:15 p.m. – Large group discussion on anti-racist practices in the workplace and the community, leading to last activity
4:15-4:25 p.m. – Individual Activity (Activity 3)
4:25-4:45 p.m. – Participants share their proposed practice(s)/course of action for the coming year

4:45-5:00 p.m. – Wrap up and conclusion

(AW.05) Staying woke on campus: Promoting social justice for multilingual students

Sponsored by: Second Language Writing Standing Group

Level: All

Cluster: Language

Abstract: Discuss practical strategies and theoretical approaches to breaking down monolingualism in understanding multilingual identities, campus conversations, learning outcomes, and pedagogy.

Full description:

Vershawn Ashanti Young has called us to explore how performance-composition can “keep us woke bout our responsibilities to antiracism, to practicing class, gender, and social justice.” The Second Language Writing SG takes up this call by focusing on how we as educators can work towards social justice for multilingual students through classroom practices, campus-wide advocacy, and administrative choices. In particular, we recognize that conversations on college campuses around linguistic difference tend to carry “an undercurrent of racial distinctions” (Shuck, 2006), and to be predicated on outdated ideas of multilingual students as no more than “imitation monolinguals” (Gramling, 2016). To bring about social justice for multilingual students, we must shift the conversations to ones that recognize multilinguals’ unique competencies in moving across languages and cultures (Canagarajah, 2013; You 2016).

Our proposed half-day workshop is intended to bring together writing teachers and tutors, administrators, and graduate students to explore questions such as:

• How can we identify our multilingual student populations?
• What aspects of multilingual student identity might we be misunderstanding? How might our labels for multilingual students be harmful?
• How can we take advantage of rhetorics of diversity and globalization at the university level to advocate for our multilingual students?
• What pedagogical practices can we adopt to break down notions of correctness in ways that create spaces for multilingual students to negotiate?

Our workshop will open with remarks from Shanti Bruce of Nova Southeastern University, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Deirdre Vinyard of the University of Washington, Bothell. Drawing on their experiences conducting a cross-institutional language survey funded by a CCCC Research Initiative Grant, their keynote address will examine how the language terms or labels at our disposal sometimes flatten or hide the complexity of language experiences students bring to campus. Their keynote address, “The Complexity of Institutional Language Surveys,” will take participants through the process of designing a survey that aimed to understand the varied linguistic experiences and identities of our students. The keynote will conclude with an interactive activity in which workshop participants consider together how they might shape their own institutional surveys to capture data that best represents what they believe their campus stakeholders need to know.

Next, our roundtables will offer practical strategies for advocating for multilingual students in both classroom practice and administration, through attention to our assumptions about student identity in teaching and campus conversations, the structure of learning outcomes, plagiarism policies and the adjudication process, and our classroom assessment practices. The workshop will conclude with individual and group reflections on how these strategies can best be implemented in our individual contexts.

Participants can expect tangible “take aways” from this workshop, including:
• How to raise faculty and administration awareness of multilingual students’ issues and perspectives
• How to develop localized learning outcomes that push back against monolingual ideologies, and how to develop teaching materials and assessment criteria that stem from and support those learning outcomes
• How to design pedagogical activities that help students themselves investigate and critique the myth of linguistic homogeneity, ranging from single lessons to major assignments
• How to read between the lines of official plagiarism policy documents, talk to students about plagiarism, and support multilingual students through the adjudication process

Roundtables

1. Complicating Multilingual Writer Identities Within and Beyond Institutional Contexts

Based on an analysis of multilingual student narratives collected as part of a broader study in a university context, facilitators will complicate notions of the multilingual student writer identity. These student narratives shed light on various assumptions that are peer-based, instructor-based and institutionally based. Facilitators will invite discussion that addresses these unproductive (and sometimes unexpected) assumptions about multilingual students. Together we will explore how instructors and administrators across different institutions can find opportunities to better understand their local and international multilingual students’ experiences.

2. Toward Socially-Just and Anti-Racist Student Learning Outcomes

Participants of this interactive roundtable session will explore strategies for promoting linguistic and racial justice through advocating for and teaching student learning outcomes that contest monolingualist ideologies. Together, we will examine ways in which speakers who are visually marked as other—including many ELLs, documented and undocumented students, international students, and domestic students of color—are particularly positioned to benefit from pedagogical practices that confront the racist politics of language. Participants will also explore and co-develop localized learning outcomes (and correlating teaching practices) that aim to work against monolingualism.

3. Engaging Students in Conversations about Multilingualism and Correctness
In our roundtable session, participants will discuss several examples of assignments (including readings, class activities, and major writing projects) that the presenters have used to actively counteract the “myth of linguistic homogeneity” (Matsuda, 2006) in foundations writing classes, thus engaging students in conversations about multilingualism. Next, the presenters will introduce an activity in which students critically engage with their own ideas about “correctness” by analyzing grading rubrics and creating their own. Finally, participants will be invited to share and discuss their own ideas for class activities that can serve to address multilingualism.

4. Broadening Campus Conversations to Include Multilingual Students
This roundtable focuses on raising awareness about the presence of our multilingual students through linking them to prominent conversations on campus. Participants will (1) see an example of such a conversation that emerged from racial incidents at one campus, a conversation that both affected and marginalized international multilingual students, (2) discuss a project that brought these students’ voices and experiences to the campus response, and (3) identify conversations and potential projects at other institutions.

5. Academic Integrity as Institutional Imperative: Navigating the Plagiarism Reporting Process With/For Multilingual Students
This roundtable creates space for SLW specialists, administrators, and others to learn how to better advocate for multilingual students by analyzing official academic honesty/plagiarism policies from a variety of institutions, and by developing talking points for use with deans, honesty committees, and others. We will discuss policy evaluation criteria like generality, specificity, and flexibility. We will share strategies for clarifying expectations and articulating the complexities that multilingual students encounter as they learn to write from sources and avoid plagiarism.

(AW.06) Performing Corpus Analysis: Putting Corpus Findings Into Pedagogical Practice

Level: All

Cluster: Language

Abstract: Offers practice and principles for bringing corpus-based studies of academic discourse into writing instruction, including use of corpus insights for better understanding “academic” language.

Full description:

A great deal of writing research in recent years has used tools from corpus linguistics to identify patterns of language choices that are meaningful in discursive contexts, ranging from Biber et al.’s research on academic registers, to Hyland’s research on stance and positioning in disciplinary discourses, to Aull’s examination of language patterns in first-year students’ writing, to Lancaster’s corpus analysis of templates from Graff and Birkenstein’s textbook They Say, I Say. Despite this outpouring of research, however, writing practitioners need further assistance in (a) translating corpus findings into meaningful principles and tasks for writing students and (b) conducting their own corpus investigations, including principles for creating databases, or corpora, of writing and tools for carrying out analysis. This half-day workshop will offer participants a range of practiced perspectives for using the insights into language that corpus studies grant us, including how they can change our understanding of language, and for applying those insights to the writing classroom.

Speaker 1, in “Moving from corpus findings to teaching of ‘hedging’ and rhetorical positioning,” will discuss ways to bring into the classroom corpus-based insights into the language of academic writing without further perpetuating prescriptive, decontextualized (“good/bad”) views of writing—which is a real danger. The case study pursued here is that of “hedging,” defined as expressions of stance that reduce writers’ commitment to claims. We know from corpus studies that hedging is important for positioning arguments, and we have evidence that experts use more hedges than certainty expressions (Hyland), that upper-level students use more than first-year students (Aull & Lancaster), and that high-graded papers use more than lower-graded ones (Lancaster). Such findings, when presented without sensitivity to genre and situation, could fuel a prescriptive view that “hedging is good.” Working against this, the speaker will explore tasks on stance that help foster reflection and targeted inquiries, and will model activities that help students explore rhetorical functions of hedges in specific rhetorical contexts.

Speaker 2, in “Exploring tools for analyzing small corpora,” will demonstrate how free, online text analysis tools can be used to investigate the linguistic features of small researcher- or student-created corpora, and will invite participants to apply these tools to a small corpus that will be provided. (Participants must bring laptops.) Speaker 2 will describe two examples of pedagogical applications of small corpus analysis. The first is a current research project that compares end-of-semester portfolio reflections written by students at different stages in the FYC sequence at one institution. The second shows how students gained genre awareness by conducting corpus analysis of texts from different disciplinary genres. Finally, workshop participants will brainstorm ideas for using corpus analysis to address a range of research questions and classroom applications.

Speaker 3, in “Using corpus tools to identify expectations for student writing,” will show how corpus analysis of published work and student work can provide tools to illustrate expectations and diagnose where students fall short in meeting those expectations. Using data from Lancaster’s article on concession and counterarguments, we will compare those findings to students’ Researched Argument papers. After I briefly introduce AntConc, participants will work with a subset of argument papers to identify places where students perform or misperform the needed rhetorical moves for acknowledging and responding to other voices. The participants and presenters will analyze why those features exist and brainstorm ways the corpus tools can help students recognize those patterns and improve their arguments.

Speaker 4 will explore “Demystifying academic language: Myths vs. reality.” One of the functions of public education is to provide all students with access to academic language—the language of schooling. This construct, however, is often presented in abstract, general ways that become a barrier to students’ academic reading and writing. Using corpus findings (as presented by Biber, Gray, and the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English), Speaker 4 will demystify academic writing through a description of its unique patterns (compression, elaboration, explicitness). Considering the fact that academic writing is the polar opposite of conversation/speech, the speaker will also suggest ways of bridging this gap between the two through the use of “popular” research/academic texts which include features of both registers.

Speaker 5, in “Functionally driven language patterns in narrative and newswriting,” will also draw heavily on the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written Language (Biber et al.), the first comprehensive corpus grammar of English, in describing differences in language patterns between narrative and news writing. Both are called “stories” in everyday speech, but the differences are substantial, including lexical density (information density), noun to verb ratios, tense and aspect, and types of subjects. Corpus studies give us substantial quantitative information about differences in texts, but they can’t by themselves provide qualitative explanations. Are these just surface differences, or are they motivated by the different work these genres enact? We will examine texts that seem prototypical, ask whether the patterns show up in those texts, and consider ways in which they are functionally motivated. Through group work and conversation, we will consider implications for teaching.

Speaker 6 will explore “Raising language awareness through hands-on exploration of COCA.” Teachers’ demonstrations or lectures on differences between informal conversational and scholarly written language can be a passive experience for students that may not translate into their making more effective choices in their own writing. Speaker 6 will take workshop participants through some simple hands-on exercises using COCA where students can explore sub-corpora in different registers such as soapies, fiction, and academic to find out for themselves whether prescriptive rules such as those against using contractions, personal pronouns, colloquial words like “kids,” and dialectal variants like “off of” are supported by the facts of real-world usage. Students can also upload a small sample of their own writing to measure the “academic strength” of their vocabulary choices against an academic sub-corpus. The aim of these exercises is to capitalize on our students’ familiarity with computer-based technologies, and spark their curiosity about the role of vocabulary and grammar in language.

(AW.07) The Choreography of Collaborative Coding

Level: All

Cluster: Research

Abstract: This workshop first offers an overview of the theory and practice of collaborative coding. Participants will then gain hands-on experience using the software program MAXQDA.

Full description:

As collaborative researchers on the Upward Project and co-authors of several publications on undergraduate research processes and perceptions, the leaders of this workshop will offer hands-on practice in collaborative coding through the lens of performance. In The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers, Johnny Saldaña explains why qualitative researchers sometimes choose to code collaboratively: “Multiple minds bring multiple ways of analyzing and interpreting the data . . . Provocative questions are posed for consideration that could possibly generate new and richer codes” (27). Yet one of the major challenges of coding collaboratively is coordinating the efforts of multiple researchers, what might be thought of as a “choreography” of collaborative coding. It is work that involves the (hopefully graceful) coordination of many moving parts. Specifically, one or more choreographers must conceptualize and develop plans and protocols for how the performance will be carried out and why: What questions does the group bring to the project? What do they wish to explore? Why a group rather than a solo performer? What approaches to coding and kinds of codes best meet these aims and purposes?
As a research method, collaborative coding also allows for interpretive dissensus and a method for achieving a quantitative result. The speakers will first share their own experiences of reader dissensus through the lens of Louise Rosenblatt’s “poem as event,” (10) which posits the reader as the performer of a text and the performance itself as an event in time. This theory of reading typically applied to literature focuses our attention on stance; in this way participants will examine the stances they take when cued by a writer of any text and share their performances with their collaborators. In reflecting on their stance toward writerly cues, readers as researchers can better define the scope of agreement for a collaborative decision.
Conceiving reading as an event in time and the coding project as a choreographed performance, the result of collaborative coding is ideally like a troupe’s dance, combining individual interpretation and expression within a meaningful whole. As Elaine Richardson observes, though, performance is nonstandardized and irreplicable. If these attributes adhere to the idea of collaborative coding as a kind of performance, where does that leave collaborative coding in the tradition of RAD research? The workshop will end by addressing the implications of collaborative coding as performance.

Organization
Before the workshop, participants will be asked to download a free trial of MAXQDA software and watch the video tutorials. The workshop will begin with an intro to collaborative coding as performance and an exploration of the kinds of research questions it can answer. The next section will apply the lens of performance and provide an overview of a project’s stages and procedures. It will move to practice with sample texts and increase in complexity until participants are coding both individually and collaboratively using MAXQDA. Because coding is cognitively demanding, coding sessions will be short and a break will be scheduled between the coding blocks. Participants will leave the workshop with an understanding of collaborative coding’s goals and processes, its theoretical and technical applications, and the organizational demands it puts on a research team.

Schedule

1:30-2:00: All: Introduction to Collaborative coding as method: What kind of research questions can it answer?
2:00-2:30: Speaker 1: The choreography of collaborative coding: stages and procedures
2:30-3:00: Speaker 2: Reading as event: Participants code sample text; Intro to MAXQDA
3:00-3:15: Break
3:15-4:00: Speaker 3: Participants individually code using MAXQDA
4:00-4:30: Speaker 4: File sharing and collaboration in MAXQDA
4:30-5:00: Implications and Wrap-Up

Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1994.

Saldaña, Johnny. The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. London, UK: Sage, 2009.

(AW.08) Pedagogical Strategies for Increasing Student Self-Efficacy: Turning “No Can” into “Can Do”

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: Participants will learn how to implement pedagogical strategies to increase student self-efficacy in the writing classroom.

Full description:

Many of our students come into the writing classroom with an attitude of they “can’t do writing.” While many instructors understand where the belief came from (poor prior performance, commentary from the past, an inadequate understanding of the tools and techniques required for success in writing, among others), the study of self-efficacy in the college classroom until recently has been slow. In fact, it wasn’t until 2010 that the first big data research was conducted in the FYC college classroom that determined that raising self-efficacy was possible and how that was accomplished. Even if an instructor knows what self-efficacy is and the role it plays in writing success, he or she may not have the tools with which to increase student self-efficacy. This workshop aims to fill that void.

This workshop brings together seasoned practitioners in the field of student self-efficacy to assist participants in developing pedagogy that enhances their own classroom practices and pedagogy and enables students to experience a rise in their own efficacy. The proposed layout of the workshop will begin with a description of self-efficacy from each presenter who will characterize agency/self-efficacy as they understand and activate it in their classes so that a range of ways to understand what self-efficacy is provided. Students need to be made overtly conscious of their own agency and self-efficacy demonstrating multiple viewpoints and techniques is paramount to success. Furthermore, each participant will offer context for the kinds of classes that they teach and the activities that are performed in the classes. Each discussion will be followed with breakout sessions to enable participants to share their own classroom pedagogies. Each breakout group will include one facilitator who will provide feedback. After each “round,” the groups will reconvene to report out and share what was discovered. The following is representative of the proposed schedule:

1:30 to 2:00 This introduction to self-efficacy will be hosted by each of the facilitators. Focus will be on self-efficacy: what it is; why it’s important; how it’s best used in the writing classroom. Theory will be emphasized with a working bibliography provided to all participants via Google Docs. This introduction will serve as a grounding for student self-efficacy and what it looks like in each facilitator’s classroom. (All Speakers, 30 minutes total)

2:00 to 3:00 In this section of the workshop, the facilitators will discuss practice and pedagogy. A Collaborative Activity Breakout Section or Learning by Doing where each facilitator will work with breakout groups to design small assignments and activities that are portable and sustainable. The facilitators will begin with a focus on what types of “small teaching” will best help students to increase their self-efficacy. Thereafter, the participants will be placed into small groups to share ideas and meet as collaborators and then reconvene with the larger group to report out. Facilitators will assist with this breakout session by rotating through the groups to ensure that attention is given to the topic. The purpose of this activity will be to provide “small teaching” moments that can be employed in daily classroom activities. (60 minutes)

3:00 to 3:15 Break (15 minutes)

3:15 to 4:15. In this section of the workshop, the facilitators will discuss the development of writing assignments with student self-efficacy in mind: What assignments work best; how to present assignments, etc.. This section of the workshop will feature a collaborative Activity Breakout Section or Learning by Doing where each facilitator will work with breakout groups to assist in the design of writing assignments and classroom activities that not only support the writing assignment but also are designed with student self-efficacy in mind. The facilitators will begin with a focus on what types of information raises student self-efficacy through the use of Self-Regulated Strategy Development (among other modalities). Thereafter, the participants will be placed into small groups to share ideas and meet as both collaborators and brainstormers and then will reconvene with the larger group to report out. Facilitators will assist with this breakout session by rotating through the groups to ensure that attention is given to the topic. The purpose of this activity will be to have the participants leave the workshop with a series of writing assignments that will assist students in building their self-efficacy. These assignments can then be employed by the participants in future courses. The participants’ take-away will be a collection of assignments that will help to build student self-efficacy. (60 minutes)

4:15 to 5:00 Wrap-up, “town hall” discussion, question and answers. (All Speakers, 45 minutes)

Participant requirements:
We recommend attendees bring laptops/tablets and a working syllabus. Participants will receive access to all documents and activities via Google Drive.

(AW.10) Quilting Composition: Performing Composition Pedagogy through Critical Quilt Making

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: Participants in this hands-on workshop will quilt to explore its pedagogical usefulness for performing composing processes, encouraging cooperative argumentation, and doing social justice work.

Full description:

As rhetoric and composition continue to recognize critical making as useful to performing composition (Haas; Ratto and Boler; Shipka and Sheridan), how might we, as scholars and teachers in the field, practice pedagogy that critically engages these ideas? This workshop answers that call by challenging participants to reimagine composition through the practice of quilting. In this hands-on workshop, the Quilters will first introduce their experiences as part of an upper division undergraduate writing course that tasked students with performing composition, cooperative argumentation, and social justice through quilting. They will then lead participants in break-out groups where each person will make their own quilt block. These individual blocks will spark discussion about the composition process, collaboration, and group work in the rhetoric and composition classroom, and quilting composition as social justice.

Quilter One, an Assistant Professor of Composition Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB), will open the workshop with an overview of her upper division composition course, “Cooperative Quilting.” In this class, Quilter One uses quilting to introduce students to cooperative argumentation, deliberative inquiry, and research and writing in the humanities and social sciences. Building on the work of Sonia Arellano, The Migrant Quilt Project, and Sewing for Social Justice, Quilter One argues that quilting is uniquely positioned as both an individual and collaborative method for performing composing processes and is conducive to individual and group dialogues about social justice and advocacy. Quilter One will discuss her experiences as the instructor of the course, including reactions from students and fellow faculty, and critical and pedagogical considerations. Finally, Quilter One will challenge assumptions about which bodies and whose bodies perform quilting by linking her approach to quilting as composition to rasquachismo (Ybarra-Frausto) through her identity as a Chicanx woman who had no experience as a quilter before this project.

Quilter Two, Quilter One’s student, discusses her role in the quilting project and creating her own quilt piece, or “block.” She reflects on how making the quilt is both stimulating and insightful as it asks individuals who have similar and different opinions to come together to create new ideas. Through her observations, she notes that quilting challenges thought processes as participants work to figure out how to best represent ideas important to them. Quilter Two will summarize her experiences and observations before leading a quilting group. Quilter Two expects that participants in this workshop will most likely change their ideas multiple times before choosing a representation, and as they quilt they will see that the outcome may not become an exact replica of what they imagined. She will use this to help spark a conversation about the composition process and encourage workshop participants to think critically about quilting as composition.

Quilter Three, also a student of Quilter One, will speak about her experience quilting in class. She will focus on her initial impressions of the project, including doubts and fears from the student perspective of being tasked with such an undertaking. Her discussion will cover her success despite not having any prior sewing experience to help make the quilt, and the challenges she faced along the way while sewing. Apart from the individual sewing tasks, she will also cover group and class dynamic and how disagreements about the quilt were settled. She will use these observations to discuss how the quilt helped develop her dialogic and ethical communication and cooperation through group quilting. Once the introduction concludes, she will help participants in her group sew, cut, measure, and fuse textiles, teach them the different dimensions of the quilt (front, back, batting), and help with questions participants may have about the project.

Quilter Four will approach the project as a researcher and respondent. She will provide a deeper understanding of how textiles function as technical documents (Haas; West-Pucket), and the history of textiles as testimonio in indigenous communities across Latin America. This connection helps ground Quilter One’s project as a decolonial Latinx feminist approach to teaching composition, especially in the context of CSUMB, a Hispanic Serving Institution. Using her experience as a farmworker to connect embodied practice to performative research, Quilter Four will show how innovative pedagogies which respond to the lived experiences of the student population encourage students to value the historically undermined epistemologies they bring into the classroom. Quilter Four will argue that quilting composition, reimagined as decolonial Latinx feminism, goes beyond traditional multimodality to connect bodies and lives through performance and production.

Workshop Schedule (half-day Wednesday afternoon session):

1:30-2:30: Introduction to Critical Quilting
In the first hour, Quilter One will give a theoretical and pedagogical introduction to critical quilt making as composition. Her discussion will include an overview of her experience designing and instructing an upper division composition course that engages quilting as pedagogy. Handouts which include a sample syllabus, quilting resources, and bibliography will be provided. Quilters Two and Three will speak about their experiences as students of the course, and the impact it had on their scholarly development. Quilter Four will discuss the project from a researcher’s perspective, focusing on how performative projects require performative research practices.

2:30-4:00: Critical Quilting Groups
After introducing the project, each Quilter will host a break-out group of participants in creating individual quilt blocks that represent their scholarly identities. All materials will be provided by the Quilters, who will lead participants in a variety of quilting practices to help them produce their quilt block, including an introduction to measuring, cutting, stitching, fusing (the no-sew method!), and other quilting considerations. No quilting experience necessary! Quilters will share their expertise and assist participants in creating their quilt blocks.

4:00-5:00: Discussion and Reflection
The last hour will ask that participants reflect on the process of creating their own quilt block and how they connect their critical making to composition theory and practice. It will also include a discussion of the challenges, risks, rewards, and other considerations of engaging quilting as composition pedagogy.

(AW.12) Teach it Like We Mean It: Helping Students Perform Their Power in Peer Review

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Pedagogies and Processes

Abstract: This highly interactive workshop will disrupt standard peer review practice with a goal to support participants’ design or revision of one peer review assignment.

Full description:

Since the social turn in composition studies, asking students to engage in collaborative peer review and response has become standard practice in the writing classroom. We require it. We praise it. We believe in it. And we should. Many composition scholars (Bruffee, Gere, and Nelson, to name a few) have illustrated that peer review can be a meaningful collaborative learning activity for students. In fact, Reid claims that peer review “is not just an assignment in a writing class; it’s the assignment that best encapsulates what we want writers to do after they leave our class” (219). Despite our assumed belief in the value of peer review, the practice is often ineffective and unimaginative. Our experience as writing instructors and WPAs has shown us that while many instructors claim to value peer review, few utilize the process to its full potential.

The problem, as we see it, is that students often act as inauthentic performers–they write, critique, and revise in a way they think will impress their instructor. Further, students often have a complicated relationship to their own authority in their writing and review habits (Walvoord and McCarthy; Schneider and Andre). We understand why—peer review is a complex series of tasks, of giving and receiving, of critiquing and responding, that have become problematically simplified and teacher-centric, and in negotiating those expectations students often default to pleasing the instructor—but this isn’t a fait accompli. Together, we can rethink how peer review is presented, and make it the heart of the composition classroom rather than an add-on.

This highly interactive workshop will help instructors disrupt standard peer review practice. We will start the day with a group discussion of the ways that students perform peer review, considering the following questions together:

-How do students perform peer review?
-How do teachers perform peer review?
-On what assumptions/beliefs do students and teachers base this performance?
-How does this performance help or hinder student feedback and revision?
-How do we know if our peer review performances are working?

This discussion will set the foundation for the question that will guide the rest of the workshop: How do we help students move beyond their current performances to develop agency and authenticity as peer reviewers?

Using participant peer review assignments to ground our work, we will rethink how to teach peer review as a genre that is rhetorically situated. We will discuss different models for peer review, such as teaching peer review as a genre of writing with a particular purpose, audience, and rhetorical work, using full-class workshops to make the work of feedback public and open, and how to assess student learning through peer review. The goal is of our conversation is to support participants’ design or revision of one peer review assignment.

Finally, we will put our discussion of peer review methodologies into context with current research trends, and discuss the potential for new publications that could arise from the new peer review activities our participants will have developed. We will ask participants to think through assignment goals, how they might collect evidence of whether or not they accomplished that goal, and how they might report what they find to their programs or to the wider field.

Workshop Outcomes

1. Participants will identify ways to introduce and contextualize the work of peer review for student writers and develop strategies to situate peer review within the academy.

2. Participants will be introduced to models of peer review that go beyond the in-class activity, including teaching peer review as a genre, full-class workshops, and assessing learning through peer review.

3. Participants will develop and problematize peer review strategies that prioritize effective and inclusive classroom practices.

4. Participants will have the opportunity to workshop and revise at least one existing peer review assignment with their peers, or create a new assignment that can then be implemented in their classes.

5. Participants will design assessments of their new peer review assignments that will help them know if peer review is doing the work they want it to do in the classroom.

6. Participants will leave with a brief bibliography overviewing peer review scholarship and a shared group-created list of possible areas for peer review research and collaborations.

7. Participants will receive handouts and links to videos and other multimodal peer review resources.

Workshop Schedule

1:30-1:45: Introductions

1:45-2:30: Discussion: Unpacking Student Performance in Peer Review
How do we characterize student performance in peer review? How does it affect peer review? Where does it come from?

2:30-3:00: Introducing Students to the Work of Peer Review: Contextualizing and Sharing
How do we introduce students to the work of peer review? How do we frame this work? How do we establish the importance? How do we model this work? In this section, we present participants with peer review models derived from our own classroom practice and research. Participants will also engage in annotating and roleplay to explore and critique these models.

3pm: Short Break

3:15pm-4:15pm: Transforming our Peer Review Practice: Considering New Models
What are different models of performing peer review in the classroom? How can we revise our peer review activities to align with our expectations of students? How can we create peer review assignments that are more accessible and inviting to students? In this section, participants will share peer review assignments they bring to the workshop with a small group and will workshop them with input from one of the panelists.

4:15-5:00: Discussion: Implementing, Assessing, and Studying Peer Review Practices
How can we sustain an intentional peer review pedagogy? How can we assess our peer review practices? What peer review resources are available to instructors? How can our peer review work contribute to research?

(AW.13) Shut up and Listen!: Speaking truth to power (2-hr Ignite Talk Workshop)

Level: All

Cluster: Writing Programs

Abstract: This workshop intends to generate both theory and pedagogy to undo systemic educational injustice and devise strategic plans for implementation at varying institutions.

Full description:

As writing center scholars begin to look at ways to make writing centers a more inclusive space for historically marginalized people, and also include more historically marginalized people in writing center scholarship, they must recognize that the goal of inclusion is not sufficient. Directors, tutors, and staff, then, must also work to actively dismantle the normalized systemic oppression (white supremacy), which still continues to silence, ignore, and delegitimize certain groups of people as well as their experiences. They must learn to listen to the experiences of these underserved people and see those experiences not only as valid, but also true and not in need of (whitesplaining). As such, this ignite talk is invites people who are willing to share their stories as historically marginalized people in the writing center in an effort to: 1) bring insight to the ways the writing center pedagogies and theories have both included historically marginalized people and—perhaps unwittingly—excluded them; 2) highlight the ways allyship fails; 3) emphasize the need for accomplices and 4) create plans of action buttressed by accomplices, mentors and like minded supporters. This ignite talk is in five parts:
Part I: Voices from the margins (20 minutes)
In Part I, scholars from historically marginalized populations, i.e. race, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. share their experiences working a writing center. These experiences include but are not limited to stories of racism, sexism, homophobia, bureaucratic red tape, hiring practices, etc.
After Part I, there is a ten-minute break where those identifying as from the dominant culture or as writing center directors, etc. reflect and write down their thoughts and questions in response to Part I (10 minutes).
Part II: Power has a say (20 minutes)
In Part II, writing center directors and scholars identifying as from the dominant culture share their experiences with historically marginalized students in the writing center, as well as discuss the ways in which the have consciously attempted to make a more (or less) inclusive writing center. These experiences could include but are not limited to hiring practices, tutor pedagogies, tutor preparatory class, etc.
After Part II, there is a ten-minute break where historically marginalized participants reflect and write down their thoughts and questions in response to Part II (10 minutes).
Part III: Responding to shared stories (30 minutes)
In Part III, participants will break into groups and share their questions and responses to the stories each person shared. These questions and responses function not only as a way to value stories and the experiences of those who work in the writing center, but also as an exchange of ideas where we begin to form ways to implement tangible change in the writing center.
Part IV: Tangible Change (30 minutes)
In Part IV, groups will share what they learned listening these stories and discuss the types of tangible changes they decided to attempt to implement within their own writing centers, writing center scholarship, or writing center pedagogy. This activity also works as an exchange of ideas as more groups share their plans for tangible change.
Part V: Forging Bonds (10 minutes)
This work is hard, but the road can be less bumpy with accomplices providing encouragement, support and a voice when yours isn’t loud enough. In Part V, individuals will be prompted to one more force of action. Participants will be asked to truly commit to actively demonstrating their accompliceship by connecting with, and exchanging contact info with those they relate to. The hope here is to foster supportive relationships that help keep the work going, and get it done.